Eric Schmidt took the back seat last year when cofounder Larry Page took the CEO title at Google. Schmidt continued as Executive Chairman and has been in charge of external relations with other companies, the public, politicians and so on.
That's what he's been doing since, though he does get a bit carried away sometimes and makes some outlandish claims.
That said, while he's still involved, he's not part of the day-to-day business at Google and, in fact, he may be looking for newer challenges.
As revealed by a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, he plans to sell quite a chunk of his Google shares, over the course of a year, which would net him about $1.5 billion, €1.14 billion at least at today's share price.
The move has been planned in advance and he will sell shares gradually so as not to make too many ripples in the stock market.
"On November 1, 2011, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, adopted a stock trading plan," the filling
explained. "In February 2012, sales of Eric’s Google stock may commence under this trading plan."
"The pre-arranged trading plan was adopted in order to allow Eric to sell a portion of his Google stock as part of his long-term strategy for individual asset diversification and liquidity," it added.
"Using this trading plan, Eric can diversify his investment portfolio and can spread stock trades out over a period of one year to reduce market impact," it said.
At this time, Schmidt owns about 2.8 percent of Google shares, giving him about 9.7 percent of the voting power since he owns some Class B shares which are worth more votes than the regular Class A stock. Class B shares come with 10 votes compared to one vote for Class A shares.
He plans to sell 2.4 million shares of Class A common stock, out of his 9.1 million shares in total, Class A and Class B combined, which would dilute his share to 2.1 percent of all shares and give him 7.3 percent voting power.
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