Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in the Yorktown neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards in long-distance running. He attended Princeton University, starting as an architecture major and switching to electrical engineering, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in 1976. From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt stayed at the International House Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle. In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, Schmidt then earned an M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments. There, he also earned a PhD degree in 1982 in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.

In June 1980, Schmidt married Wendy Susan Boyle (born 1955 in Short Hills, New Jersey). They lived in Atherton, California, in the 1990s. They have a daughter, Sophie, and had another, Alison, who died in 2017 from an illness. The two separated in 2011.

In 1983, Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems as its first software manager. He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises.

In April 1997, Schmidt became the CEO and chairman of the board of Novell. He presided over a period of decline at Novell where its IPX protocol was being replaced by open TCP/IP products, while at the same time Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95, making Novell much less profitable. In 2001, he departed after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners.

New America is a non-profit public-policy institute and think tank, founded in 1999. Schmidt succeeded founding chairman James Fallows in 2008.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him, they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

In March 2001, Schmidt joined Google’s board of directors as chair, and became the company’s CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shared responsibility for Google’s daily operations with founders Page and Brin. Prior to the Google initial public offering, Schmidt had responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on the management of the vice presidents and the sales organization. According to Google, Schmidt’s job responsibilities included “building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while the product development cycle times are kept to a minimum.”

In 2004, Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of US$1 (which continued through 2010) with other compensation of $557,465 in 2006, $508,763 in 2008, and $243,661 in 2009. He did not receive any additional stock or options in 2009 or 2010. Most of his compensation was for “personal security” and charters of private aircraft.

In 2005, Google blacklisted CNET reporters from talking to Google employees for one year, until July 2006, after CNET published personal information on Schmidt, including his political donations, hobbies, salary, and neighborhood, that had been obtained through Google searches.

On August 28, 2006, Schmidt was elected to Apple Inc.’s board of directors, a position he held until August 2009.

The Schmidt Family Foundation was established in 2006 by Wendy Schmidt and Eric Schmidt to address issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources.

In 2007, PC World ranked Schmidt as the first on its list of the 50 most important people on the Web, along with Google co-founders Page and Brin.

Schmidt was an informal advisor and major donor to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate. He was mentioned as a possible candidate for the Chief Technology Officer position, which Obama created in his administration, and Obama considered him for Commerce Secretary. After Obama won in 2008, Schmidt became a member of President Obama’s transition advisory board and then a member of the United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Schmidt has served on Google’s government relations team.

Schmidt was on the list of ARTnews’s 200 top art collectors in 2008. Schmidt denied that he was an art collector, despite his involvement in art, in 2019.

In 2009, Eric and Wendy Schmidt endowed the Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at Princeton University with $25 million. The Fund’s purpose is to support cutting-edge research and technology in the natural sciences and engineering, encouraging collaboration across disciplines. It awarded $1.2 million in grants in 2010 and $1.7 million in grants in 2012.

During an interview aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary “Inside the Mind of Google,” Schmidt was asked, “People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?” He replied: “I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Founded in 2010 by Schmidt and Dror Berman, Innovation Endeavors is an early-stage venture capital. The fund, based in Palo Alto, California, invested companies such as Mashape, Uber, Quixey, Gogobot, BillGuard, and Formlabs.

At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good. And he said that the only way to manage the challenges is “much greater transparency and no anonymity.” Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, “true anonymity is too dangerous.” However, at the 2013 Hay Festival, Schmidt expressed concern that sharing of personal information was too rampant and could have a negative effect, particularly on teenagers, stating that “we have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did”, declaring that “We have a point at which we [Google] forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do. There are situations in life that it’s better that they don’t exist.”

In August 2010, Schmidt clarified his company’s views on network neutrality: “I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. But it’s okay to discriminate across different types. So you could prioritize voice over video. And there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue.”

In its 2011 ‘World’s Billionaires’ list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion.

On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as the CEO of Google but would take new title as executive chairman of the company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Google gave him a $100 million equity award in 2011 when he stepped down as CEO. On April 4, 2011, Page replaced Schmidt as the CEO.

On May 16, 2013 Margaret Hodge MP, the chair of the United Kingdom Public Accounts Committee accused Google of being “calculated and unethical” over its use of artificial distinctions to avoid paying billions of pounds in Corporation tax owed by its UK operations. Google was accused by the committee, which represents the interests of all UK taxpayers, of being “evil” for not paying its “fair amount of tax”.

In 2013, Schmidt stated that the government surveillance in the United States was the “nature of our society” and that he was not going to “pass judgment on that”. However, on the revelation that the NSA has been secretly spying on Google’s data centers worldwide, he called the practice “outrageous” and criticized the NSA’s collection of Americans phone records.

In January 2013, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas visited North Korea along with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. The trip was highly publicized and controversial due to the ongoing tension between North Korea and the United States. On August 10, 2013, North Korea announced an indigenous smartphone, named Arirang, that may be using the Google Android operating system.

In March 2013, Schmidt visited Myanmar, which had been ruled by a military junta for decades and is transitioning to a democracy. During his visit, Schmidt spoke in favor of free and open Internet use in the country, and was scheduled to meet with the country’s president.

In 2013, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of the Google Ideas think tank, published The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, which discusses the geopolitical implications of increasingly widespread Internet use and access to information. The book was inspired by an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine the two co-wrote in 2010. He also wrote the preface to The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs, by William H. Draper, III.

In January 2013, Schmidt visited North Korea with his daughter Sophie, Jared Cohen, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.

In 2014, Schmidt co-authored the New York Times best-selling book How Google Works with Jonathan Rosenberg, former Senior Vice President of Products at Google and current advisor to Google CEO Larry Page, and Alan Eagle. The book is a collection of the business management lessons learned over the course of Schmidt and Rosenberg’s time leading Google. In his book, Eric Schmidt argues that successful companies in the technology-driven internet age should attract smart and creative employees and create an environment where they can thrive. He argues that the traditional business rules that make a company successful have changed; companies should maximize freedom and speed, and decision-making should not lie in the hands of the few. Schmidt also emphasizes that individuals and small teams can have a massive impact on innovation.

In 2014, he had a cameo appearance in the film Dumb and Dumber To, starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. He also had a cameo appearance in the HBO show Silicon Valley.

The foundation also donated $10 million to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2015.

In 2015, the UK Government introduced a new law intended to penalise Google and other large multinational corporations’ artificial tax avoidance. Google is accused of avoiding paying tens of billions of dollars of tax through a convoluted scheme of inter-company licensing agreements and transfers to tax havens. Schmidt was also criticised for his inaccurate use of the term ‘capitalism’ to describe billions of dollars being transferred into tax havens where no economic activity was actually taking place.

In January 2015, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, met with Pope Francis to discuss technology and society. This was the first meeting between the Pope and a technology leader, which was subsequently followed by other tech leaders visiting the Vatican.

In April 2015, Schmidt delivered the commencement address at Virginia Tech, located in Schmidt’s childhood home of Blacksburg, Virginia. This came on the heels of Schmidt making a two million dollar donation to Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. Schmidt’s philanthropy is the result of his long standing friendship with Virginia Tech’s former president Paul Torgersen. His donation funded the Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean’s Chair in Engineering.

In March 2016 it was announced that Eric Schmidt would chair a new advisory board for the Department of Defense, titled the Defense Innovation Advisory Board. The advisory board serves as a forum connecting mainstays in the technology sector with those in the Pentagon.

On December 21, 2017, Schmidt announced he would be stepping down as the executive chairman of Alphabet. Schmidt stated that “Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition.”

In February 2020, Schmidt left his post as technical advisor of Alphabet after 19 years with the company.

In July 2020, Schmidt was started working with the US government to create a tech college as part of an initiative to educate future coders, cyber-security experts and scientist.

Schmidt launched a podcast, Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, in August 2020.

In October 2020 Schmidt stated that social networks were amplifiers for idiots and crazy people and that was an Unintended consequence.

In September 2020, Schmidt purchased Montecito Mansion, a 22,000-square-foot estate overlooking Santa Barbara, for $30.8 million.

In November 2020, Recode reported that Schmidt is finalizing his plan to become a citizen of the island nation of Cyprus. He is one of the highest-profile or famous people to take advantage of the controversial immigrant investor programs that offers ‘passport-for-sale’. This passport can be used to enter any country in the European Union.