Activist investor Jeff Ubben urges ‘fix’ for Silicon Valley

One of the West Coast’s leading activist investors has added to the growing criticism of corporate governance in Silicon Valley, and of Google in particular, amid fresh warnings of a bubble in tech valuations.

Jeff Ubben, whose hedge fund ValueAct is an investor in Microsoft, eBay and Adobe Systems, singled out what he said was excessive compensation for Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman. “Jamie Dimon [chairman of JPMorgan Chase] gets hauled over the coals in New York for his $20 million, but Eric Schmidt presides over four board meetings and gets paid $100 million,” he said, referring to the Google chairman’s 2011 package.

David Einhorn, the activist investor behind Greenlight Capital who has taken on Silicon Valley companies such as Apple in recent years, warned that excessive enthusiasm about “cool kid companies” had created a new bubble in tech valuations to rival the late 1990s.