Follow the money.

People over 55 are most concerned about one thing: retirement. Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for. In the US, you do this by holding assets that yield returns on your investment. Over the last half-century, we've made returning that yield the main objective of publicly-traded corporations to the complete exclusion of everything else.

People like Schmidt were hired by boards, who were elected by shareholders, with the hope that they'd increase returns. The biggest shareholders in most American companies are pension and retirement funds, followed by funds that are not necessarily retirement funds but are often used by individuals to back IRAs and 401(k)s.

When the executives of Schmidt's generation were hired, they were incentivized with stock options instead of cash. Their compensation was directly tied to how much money was returned to shareholders.

When you maximize a return to a shareholder, you do that by minimizing the costs of the inputs to the business. One of those costs is labor. Payroll, benefits, the costs of the office space people work in, etc.

GenAI offers shareholders - which can be seen as synonymous with people who are approaching retirement or who are retirees - a promise of massively reducing labor costs. In the minds of a lot of institutional investors, they could have companies where the same amount of value is created with only c-suite and executive-level employees working with teams of AI agents that, over time, will become cheaper and cheaper. What was once hundreds or thousands of employees is now a few dozen.

Now, where does this leave young and middle-aged people? In a place where they have a wildly uncertain future. But that's not the retiree's problem. They want the villa on the golf course in Florida, and by the time you have real social problems resulting from a population with no hope for the future, the retirees will be dead or too old to care.

Schmidt's cohort, for their part, have enough money to deal with those problems in the near to mid-term. Or, at least, they think they do.

EDIT:

Love getting downvoted for what is, essentially, a factual statement.