How Google's executive chairman is gaining a reputation as a playboy, thanks to a deleted Instagram account, a £9.4 million Manhattan penthouse and his very own superyacht.

Rex Features

What happens when you Google the man who runs Google? Schmidt happens, that's what.

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As in: Eric Schmidt, the internet company's 58-year-old executive chairman - a man whose circular glasses, boiled-ham complexion and shapeless black suits make him look more like a mid-level Scandinavian architect from 1986 than one of the richest men on earth.

Schmidt is everywhere online.

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Type his name into the site over which he presides, and the bots and spiders that toil beneath the surface of the web will present you with thousands of blandly identical images of his corporate head shot, along with some extraordinary details about the Washington-born, married-with-kids programmer who spends much of his time circling the globe in his Gulfstream V jet.

Details like his £5bn of personal stockholdings, for example. Or his recent visits to Number Ten Downing Street - where he has a place on David Cameron's business advisory group - and to one of Kim Il-sung University's computer labs in North Korea. Not to mention the Bermudan tax-avoidance scheme he helps operate as a member of Google's board of directors - the company paid just £11.2m to HM Revenues &

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Customs last year on an estimated £3bn of UK revenues - and his now-infamous statement that: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Of all the above, of course, it has been the Google chairman's radical view of privacy rights - or our lack thereof - that has transformed him from anonymous mega-nerd to a kind of Big Brother figure for the post-iPhone age.

Schmidt has boasted that "we can more or less know what you're thinking about", that "we can suggest what you should do next", and opined that everyone in the future should change their name on reaching adulthood to escape the undeletable indiscretions of their teenage years. The last was a joke, he has since claimed, although it's hard to blame anyone for taking him seriously. This is, after all, the man who brought us Street View maps, video-enabled glasses and software that can use our profile pictures in adverts targeted at our friends.

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If you have something that you don't want anyone to know,maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place Eric Schmidt

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But since the mid-Noughties, in an irony so large it can probably be viewed from one of the asteroids that Google soon hopes to mine (on which more later), Schmidt has found himself a victim of the same kind of privacy-obliterating tools that his company has spent 15 years developing.

There has been speculation about his sound-proofed penthouse apartment in the heart of Manhattan.

Racy images of bikini-topped young females from a now-closed Instagram account. And, bizarrely, an account of the Google chairman's 2007 road trip to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, during which he had a screaming argument with Apple founder Steve Jobs on a desert payphone, and was later photographed amid the acid heads and techno freaks dressed in a red neckerchief and a pair of Breaking Bad-style lab goggles.

All of which couldn't have come at a more sensitive time for Google, given that its share price has just blown past the psychologically important $1,000 mark, in large part due to the salivation of investors over the very same services that have so enraged Schmidt's critics.

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At the time of writing, Schmidt was maintaining an uncomfortable silence on the increasing clamour over his not-so-private life. But his wife of 33 years, Wendy (with whom he has two grown-up daughters, Allison and Sophie), speaking to a New York Times reporter from her home on the billionaires' island of Nantucket,