| Kent Walker | |
| Birth Place: | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Spouse: | Diana Walsh |
| Education: | Harvard University (BA) Stanford University (JD) |
Kent Walker (born 1961) is an American legal executive who has served as President of Global Affairs and chief legal officer of Google & Alphabet since 2021.[1]
Walker was born in Palo Alto.[2] He graduated from Harvard College in 1983 and received his JD from Stanford Law School.[3]
In 1990, Walker began his legal career in San Francisco at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Robertson & Falk, now Arnold & Porter, and worked as a litigator specializing in government and public law issues. He then served 5 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the United States Department of Justice.[2]
Walker worked at various technology companies, starting in 1995 with Airtouch Communications. From 1997 to 2001[2] he was deputy general counsel at Netscape,[4] from 2001 until 2004 he worked for Liberate Technologies, and from 2003 until 2006[2] he was deputy general counsel at eBay.[5]
Since 2006,[2] Walker has advised Alphabet's board and management on legal and policy issues, its work with governments around the world,[6] its policies for content on its various services,[7] and its philanthropic efforts.[8] Since 2021, he has been President of Global Affairs and chief legal officer at Alphabet. On September 12, 2023 Walker was followed by a man dressed up as Mr. Monopoly, as he went to attend Google's antitrust trial United States v. Google LLC (2023) at federal court in Washington, D.C.[9] in which the DOJ accused Google of illegally abusing its monopoly power as the largest online search tool.
As of 2018, he served on the Harvard Board of Overseers[10] and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[11] In 2015 he was on the HeartFlow Board of Directors,[12] and advised the Mercy Corps Social Ventures Fund.[13]
In 2008, Walker introduced a "communication with care" policy at Google, which resulted in the company adopting a policy of automatic deletion of employee chat logs, a practice that became a source of legal controversy for the company during later federal antitrust lawsuits.[14] [15]
As of 2010, Walker was married to Diana Walsh, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, and they had three children.[2] As of 2022, his base salary at Google was $1,000,000, with a maximum of a $2,000,000 annual bonus, one tranche of performance stock units of $5,000,000, and one tranche of restricted stock units worth $18,000,000.