Married billionaire Eric Schmidt launched Steel Perlot with 29-year-old entrepreneur Michelle Ritter while they were dating — a venture that has blurred his professional and personal life.
Since leaving Google as chairman, Eric Schmidt has wielded a $20 billion fortune to build an ecosystem of influence, overseeing a vast constellation of companies and investments and taking on prestigious advisory roles that have cemented his reputation as Silicon Valley statesman and AI policy whisperer to the Pentagon.
And for the past two years, the 68-year-old has extended that clout — and committed at least $100 million, according to three sources — to a startup accelerator called Steel Perlot, which he leads as executive chairman with CEO Michelle Ritter, a 29-year-old entrepreneur who he has been dating.
Schmidt’s funds were intended to support the accelerator’s business, launching and investing in new ventures under the Steel Perlot umbrella. But just over a year after it launched, the company was asking Schmidt’s family office, Hillspire LLC, to pay its bills.
In a January 2023 email to Hillspire, a Steel Perlot executive requested nearly $2.5 million to meet payroll and credit card debts racked up by the company and its subsidiaries that month. “Eric, copied, has the context,” wrote Gal Treger, Steel Perlot’s head of VC funds, according to a copy of the email seen by Forbes. Hillspire covered the payroll costs, said people familiar with the matter. (Treger didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Schmidt’s extramarital relationships have been splashed across Page Six for years, though he remains married to his wife of four decades Wendy Schmidt. But his role in Steel Perlot appears to be the first time he’s publicly entered into a major business relationship with someone he is dating. (Wendy Schmidt declined to comment.)
Michelle Ritter (right) at an event in the Hamptons. PATRICK MCMULLAN VIA GETTY IMAGES
The former Google CEO is typically quiet about the degree of his involvement in the sprawl of funds, foundations and LLCs with which he is associated. Steel Perlot is an exception: He has publicly stated his role as Steel Perlot’s executive chairman, and sources in a position to know recalled Schmidt participating in business operations, such as deciding which startups to look at for potential investment. He would occasionally appear in meetings alongside Ritter. He is a “very, very active chairman,” Ritter told Forbes. “We have a very typical CEO-chairman relationship.”
Schmidt has made it clear to employees that Steel Perlot is Ritter’s company and she has full autonomy to run it. But in her role, Ritter appears to have overstated financial commitments and overhyped involvement from industry leaders in Steel Perlot, according to documents and interviews with 11 former employees and people linked to Steel Perlot.
In an interview with Forbes, Ritter claimed the company has multiple backers beyond Schmidt. She added that Steel Perlot now also manages a total of $450 million on behalf of institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, and had been deploying that capital “since April.”
But Forbes was unable to find evidence that anyone other than Schmidt had provided significant funds to Steel Perlot, and Ritter declined to identify other investors. When pressed for more details on the asset management portfolio, Ritter clarified that Steel Perlot had only received a “preliminary [letter of intent]” from institutional investors, including a family office and sovereign wealth fund. She declined to comment further.
“We were sold this bill of goods that we were participating in Eric Schmidt’s concept to fund the future. Instead it was a vanity project.”
According to multiple employees who worked with her, Ritter also implied that tech elite including Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, with whom she and Schmidt attended social events, were “committed” or “involved” in Steel Perlot projects. Other times, employees said Ritter implied that Steel Perlot had financial or business commitments from Middle Eastern investors, such as the Emirati sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. Bloomberg and Mubadala did not respond to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Bezos declined to comment.
In a statement, Ritter said that Steel Perlot had discussions with Mubadala, but the sovereign fund is not a “formal partner.” Regarding Bezos and Bloomberg, she added: “Steel Perlot leadership regularly engages with business leaders across the technology industry, including these individuals, though they are not formal partners.”
“We were sold this bill of goods that we were participating in Eric Schmidt’s concept to fund the future,” a former Steel Perlot employee told Forbes, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from Schmidt and Ritter. “Instead it was a vanity project.”
Schmidt declined to respond to questions about Steel Perlot, his relationship to Ritter and his investments. When asked, spokesperson Matthew Hiltzik told Forbes that any relationship between Schmidt and Ritter isn’t related to the success of the business and the billionaire intends to continue supporting Steel Perlot financially.
“We have built something within two years that I’m proud of, and there are things that I would edit,” Ritter told Forbes. She added: “I’m really, really grateful for the great talent that we have. I’m also very grateful for the funding that I’ve gotten from friends and family, but also from Eric, who is a very significant investor at the top.”
Ritter, who graduated from Columbia Law School in 2021 after completing stints as a cybersecurity research assistant at the Department of Homeland Security and a summer intern at the law firm Skadden, told Forbes she was introduced to Schmidt via a law school connection. The same year she graduated, it was reported by the New York Post they were romantically entangled when they attended the launch of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket plane in New Mexico.
A few months after Branson’s event, the pair launched Steel Perlot, which has offices in New York and Los Angeles, at a party at Manhattan’s swanky Zero Bond club. Schmidt later described it as “an AI and analytics company of companies” that would invest in a fruit salad of verticals from virtual reality to space. Elaborating on that mission to some employees, Ritter invoked the empires of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk as an array of world changing companies run under the aegis of a single person, according to three former employees.
Steel Perlot’s name is something of a mystery, and several former employees said they still don’t know its origins. Forbes found an image of Ritter standing next to a small teak sailboat, named Steel Perlot. She described it as a gift from a friend that she named after the company, not vice versa. Beyond that, she would say only that she uses the name’s origins as an interview question for prospective hires. “It’s a secret no one knows other than me,” Ritter said. “I let people guess.”
To date, Steel Perlot has invested at least $20 million into more than a dozen startups, such as the AI company Pryon, a crypto trading company called Tristero and payments platform Keeta. It has also launched two companies, including a decentralized banking platform called Knox Networks, which Ritter claimed has pilot programs with the Bank of England and the World Bank (neither responded to a comment request).
She told Forbes that another company, StarX — of which she is founder and CEO — recently signed an agreement with FIFA (International Association Football Federation) to beta test “a cohesive global football community through various technologies to be developed by StarX.” In a statement, FIFA said it is “exploring with StarX new ways of fan engagement across our tournaments.”
But lines between Steel Perlot and other Schmidt outfits seemed to blur at times. In one case, Ritter told Forbes a stealth AI moonshot called Future House was “spun out” of Steel Perlot and funded through a philanthropic arm of the company. A document addressed to Ritter from Future House, and obtained by Forbes, thanked her for backing them and proposed naming one of its “early discoveries” after Steel Perlot. However, two sources close to the AI project claimed its founders received only a small sum from Ritter in consulting fees. These sources additionally claimed that Future House, Inc. received more than $10 million from entities controlled by Schmidt. Future House declined to comment.
Closer to home, multiple employees told Forbes that they were required to meet Ritter for business meetings at several of Schmidt’s estates, where she was residing at the time. That included a $60 million former Hilton compound in Los Angeles’ Holmby Hills, a penthouse in Manhattan and a sprawling lakeside estate near East Hampton that Schmidt purchased for $47 million in 2021, according to sources and property tax records. (The purchase has not been previously reported.)
“We have a very typical CEO-chairman relationship.”
Two former employees said that some Steel Perlot staff received salaries from another entity, Audem Management, LLC, which was established in 2021 after Schmidt and Ritter started dating and is managed by Ritter’s father. The company serves as a contractor of a Schmidt-owned entity and is used to pay a staff of butlers, housekeepers, maintenance and construction workers at properties owned by Schmidt and at times occupied by Ritter, including the Holmby Hills residence. Ritter said Audem is a “personal endeavor”; a person close to Schmidt said Audem had saved the billionaire approximately $5 million in costs at his properties.
In recent weeks, it appears to have been business as usual for Schmidt and Ritter. The former Google CEO gave a talk at Harvard University about AI and national security, and this month a venture capital firm he co-founded, Innovation Endeavors, raised $600 million for a new fund. Meanwhile, on Instagram, Ritter posted a photo of her posing between tennis star Maria Sharapova and former Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin; another shows her standing with Barack Obama on a golf course.
As for Steel Perlot, Ritter told Forbes she is planning several announcements in the next six months. She added that she is currently in talks for a new cash infusion into the company (though she declined to identify the potential investors).
When asked, representatives for Schmidt and Ritter declined to discuss the current status of their relationship. However, a person close to the situation said they are currently spending “less time together.”
