Eric Schmidt allegedly promised ex a slice of his Anthropic jackpot but shes still waiting for it: sources
Five percent of one percent doesn’t sound like much — until it’s part of a trillion dollar deal.Eric Schmidt stands to make billions when Anthropic goes public, but the ex-girlfriend who claims she helped him with the deal says he promised her a percentage — then cut her out when they broke up, sources told the Post.The former Google boss, 71, reportedly owns about 1% of the AI company behind Claude, which former love Michelle Ritter, 32, says he promised to share with her.At the $965 billion valuation Anthropic announced in May, Schmidt’s stake would be worth nearly $10 billion on paper, a figure that has likely risen after strong indications the company will hit the stock market later this month with a valuation of around $1.5 trillion.Ritter is fighting in court with Schmidt, having filed a federal complaint citing her “Anthropic-related” work as among several projects for which she alleges she went unpaid. Ritter has also claimed that playboy Schmidt — who is married but has an open relationship with wife Wendy — allegedly promised Ritter 5% of his Anthropic stake in exchange for her work on the deal according to a source familiar with her claims.Ritter claimed the ex-Google CEO repeatedly reassured her, “I’ve got you,” when it came to sharing out its value, the source said.“She trusted him.Now she just wants to get paid,” the source said.A source close to Ritter told The Post they’d personally heard Schmidt say in Los Angeles, where the two lived together for a period, that Ritter would get her share of the Anthropic shares.Emails obtained by The Post indicate Ritter was directly involved in early talks with Anthropic’s founders —but the claim to 5% of his lucrative share does not appear in those emails, and has also not been included in subsequent court papers related to the pair’s bitter split in 2024. Ritter was a 26-year-old Columbia University law and MBA student when she first met Schmidt in 2020.
They started dati...