Google CFO to Spend More Time With Friends, Family, Obscene IPO Wealth

George Reyes, the man who stewarded Google through its unorthodox IPO, is taking some time off to enjoy a bit of the wealth that the offering created. Late yesterday afternoon, Google said Reyes plans to retire as chief financial officer as soon as the company finds his replacement. “I’ve known and admired George since our days together at Sun,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement. “As Google’s CFO, George successfully navigated our innovative IPO, the regulatory demands of Sarbanes-Oxley and the management challenges of scaling a global finance organization. Though we fully appreciate his decision to step back from active management, we’ll miss his thoughtfulness, good humor and wisdom.”

Wow. Reyes’s Sarbanes-Oxley jokes must have been a laugh riot. Anyway …

High-level executive departures like Reyes’s are something of a rarity at Google. Reyes (pictured in the photo illustration above, right), who came to Google in 2002, is only the second third key executive to leave the company since Cindy McCaffrey (hot tub, above left), Google’s vice president of corporate marketing, and Wayne Rosing (hot tub, above center), its VP of engineering, retired. And though Reyes didn’t say why he decided to step down, his reasons for doing so are clear to anyone who pays attention to the company’s share price. At closing bell yesterday, GOOG was trading north of $500. And as of last December, Reyes–who’s sold off $259.5 million of Google stock since August 2004–was still holding 51,750 exercisable options.

Strike price? Five dollars apiece.