November 10th, 2008
Schmidt says no to CTO job
Photo by WorldWidePhotography
Fresh from his stint on Barack Obama’s economic transition team, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made an appearance on Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money”, where he put to rest speculation — like that from TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner — that he would be the top pick for CTO of the country. Schmidt said:
I love working at Google and I’m very happy to stay at Google. So the answer is no. Google is its own exciting opportunity.
Of course it’s not unheard of for someone to deny they’re interested in a plum government job only to heed the call when it comes. After all, Schmidt has been blowing the clarion call about technological approaches to alternative energy for awhile now. When the president-elect says, “I need you to help me fix this,” how hard is it to say, no, I’d rather help Google make billions more? Even so, I think is better suited as an advisory board member than payrolled CTO. He straddles the boundaries of energy and technology, as several of his comments to Cramer show:
We’ve announced an energy plan which is just a proposal. It seems to me that if we could just fix the fossil fuel dependency, we could get the oil prices down, put a lot of people to work and, oh and by the way, solve the climate change problem for good. … The sun’s going to continue to shine, the wind’s going to continue to blow, there’s a lot of heat in geothermal … if we would just start using that and build a grid to get the energy to where the people are, we would solve most of our energy problem.
He points out that technologies like plug-in hybrids represent a triple: energy independence, climate change and the economy:
They’re more economically efficient, they use hugely less oil and by the way, they’re built in America. In Michigan, which has this huge unemployment problem, you can build the batteries for hybrids. …. Green technology is good for America, it creates jobs and solves real problems we have today.
