Jon Edwards
‘Don’t be evil’ may be the old Google mantra, but it looks as if that still leaves space for a string of affairs and some business double-dealing on the part of the company CEO, Eric Schmidt.
An incisive Valleywag report looks at the breakdown of Schmidt’s relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the way things came to a head in 2007, while the Google boss was attending Burning Man with one of his mistresses.
A furious Jobs called Schmidt to berate him for his duplicity in entering the smartphone market. Rumours that Google had been developing such a device had circulated for years, but as Burning Man kicked off word leaked from HTC, alongside details of Google’s mobile OS, Android.
“Jobs knew what was going on, of course. And he felt betrayed,” the report informs.
He called Schmidt, who was driving in the desert near Burning Man, but the call dropped, so the Google boss drove to a payphone to call Jobs back. (He’d given his Apple-donated iPhone to his mistress).
Apple’s boss “shouted” and “railed” at Schmidt, furious at his smartphone plans and the duplicity with which he had sat in on meetings concerning Apple’s iPhone plans, while secretly cooking-up a competitor.
“Steve was very, very upset,” Schmidt is said to have later told his companion Bohner. “My God, he was so angry.”
These relationship patterns have impacted Schmidt’s other dealings with people, including Google founder Sergey Brin, his former mistress, Kate Bohner, the report explains. “I don’t think he had any” true friends, the story source claims.
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