Blowout Specials“Eric Schmidt hates camping. Which is why, when Steve Jobs broke up with him, Google’s CEO was at a payphone on a lonesome desert road, 45 minutes from Burning Man, with only his mistress Kate Bohner near his side,” Ryan Tate reports for Gawker’s Valleywag. “This is the story told to us by a close friend of Bohner’s, who spoke about the undoing of several of Schmidt’s close relationships.”

“A guy who hates camping is an odd fit for an anarchic, weeklong community-building experiment in the Nevada wilderness,” Tate reports. “Each day, to attend Burning Man 2007, Schmidt would drive two and half hours from his Reno hotel to get there, and then two and a half hours to return and avoid sleeping on the dirt.”

“Schmidt’s extraordinary Burning Man commute betrayed an extraordinary hunger to connect with his peers, and especially at the desert event, with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s co-founders and his closest associates,” Tate reports. “Brin and Page are said to have arrived at the desert festival by helicopter. They were friendly but not exactly friends with Schmidt; nearly two decades younger than the CEO with whom they share power, Brin and Page ended up spending their real buddy time in the desert with other people.”

Tate reports, “Schmidt’s most memorable interaction from that year’s Burning Man, then, would be his ferocious roadside parting with Steve Jobs… The 2007 desert phone call between Jobs and Schmidt marked the beginning of the end. It was, we’re told, an incredible moment, as much for Schmidt’s professed surprise as for the look on his face as Jobs berated him.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. – Google CEO Eric Schmidt, December 2009