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Kent Walker
Kent Walker
Personal details
Born	1961 (age 63–64); Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Spouse	Diana Walsh
Education	Harvard University (BA); Stanford University (JD)

Kent Walker (born 1961)^[1] is an American legal executive who has served as President of Global Affairs and chief legal officer of Google & Alphabet since 2021.^[2]

Early life and education

Walker was born in Palo Alto.^[1] He graduated from Harvard College in 1983^[1] and received his JD from Stanford Law School.^[3]

Career

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.^[1]

Walker worked at various technology companies, starting in 1995 with Airtouch Communications. From 1997 to 2001^[1] he was deputy general counsel at Netscape,^[4] from 2001 until 2004 he worked for Liberate Technologies, and from 2003 until 2006^[1] he was deputy general counsel at eBay.^[5]

Since 2006,^[1] Walker has advised Alphabet's board and management on legal and policy issues,^[5] 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.^[2] 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.

Board service

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]

Controversy

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]

Personal life

As of 2010, Walker was married to Diana Walsh, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, and they had three children.^[1] 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.^[2]