Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Plans To Sell 3.2M Company Shares Over The Next Year, 42% Of His Stake In Google

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, the company today reported in an SEC filing, plans to sell about 3.2 million of the Class A common stock he currently owns through a stock trading plan, which would reduce his share in the company by about 42 percent. At Google’s current stock price, this transaction would be worth about $2.5 billion.

According to the filing, Schmidt currently owns about 7.6 million shares of Class A and Class B common stock. That, Google reports, accounts for about 2.3 percent of Google’s outstanding capital stock and 8.2 percent of the voting power.

Thanks to this plan, Google said in today’s filing, “Eric can diversify his investment portfolio and can spread stock trades out over a period of one year to reduce market impact.”

In a similar filing in February of last year, Google announced that Schmidt planned to sell about 2.4 million shares of his Class A stock, which was worth about $1.5 billion at the time. In late 2011, Schmidt still owned about 9.1 million Google shares.

Google founder Sergey Brin, according to related filings, currently holds about 8.5 percent of the voting power and his co-founder and current CEO Larry Page holds 8.7 percent.