The End of the Affair? Not for Eric Schmidt

That said, relationships outside of marriage are not uncommon.

Dividing your stock portfolio isn’t taxable as you aren’t selling anything. Also you can divide up the houses and then if one party’s assessed value is more than trivially different from the other’s, you can make up the difference in the division of the financial assets.

Most people of course have perhaps one house and many do sell it to split the asset value, but as I said in my comment we are talking about the billionaires (in Schmidt’s case) and multimillionaires where there are many more degrees of freedom.

You don't understand how finances work for people in his wealth class. When you have billions of dollars in net worth, at a certain point, it's pretty meaningless how much there actually is because it's pretty hard for one or two people to spend it that fast. At a certain level, it might as well be "infinity amount of money."

Then there's the investment income from such a large portfolio.

If you have $1BN in stonks and we assume they rise with the market average of about 10%, minus 3% inflation, plus we'll fudge it a bit lower just for the sake of envelope math...

...you are making $45M/year inflation adjusted off your investments.

Schmidt is worth over $20BN. If only $10BN of that is in stocks, then he's making half a billion a year. That is about $139,000 per day in investment income.

Do you think he cares that his investment returns drop to (inflation adjusted) $75k/day?

Let's assume he loses half his investment income. Let's also assume he's spending every single dime of that annual investment income. Let's also assume he doesn't change his spending after the divorce.* That means that if he lives another 30 years. At $250M/year, that's $7.5BN. Which means he'd die with $3BN in net worth. Which is enough to make $135M in income for whoever gets it.

Do you now understand?

If not, it's like this: you live in the desert. You have a tank next to your house that is your only source of water, and it gets filled every so often. Your daily consumption rate is fairly important, and that tank losing half its capacity, would be a pretty big deal, right? You're going to at least pull out a spreadsheet and run some numbers and see if you're going to make it until the next shipment. You might do your laundry a bit less, not wash your car as much.

Now, let's do the billionaire equivalent: someone lives in the pacific northwest, and their water supply comes from a 1000 acre, ~20 foot deep lake. They also have a town water supply connection.

A magic wizard comes along and shrinks the lake by half its size. Poof! 500 acres gone.

Do you think they pull out a spreadsheet to figure out if things are going to be OK? Do you think their water consumption habits change?

I think this is where your logic breaks down. Many billionaires exist due to no more intelligence and ambition than the average person but to have the luck of being born in the right place and time. Many billionaires (Buffett and Gates to name two off the top of my head) have admitted that luck was the primary reason they are multi-billionaires rather than millionaires or lower.