It works fine here, so probably this is about graphics output or something related. Google might have better advices, but for a start you could launch it from a terminal and see if you get any (warning/error) output. Just open a terminal and run the executable (here I assume you have put it to "google-earth" directory under your home directory; if it's different from that, change the command below accordingly)
Code:
~/google-earth/googleearth
Note: if you have run it before, you probably do get a warning saying that it can't create prefs directory; this is fine.