There is this theme in the technology world where high-profile executives get an annual salary of $1. Apple’s Steve Jobs has been earning one dollar for years. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin earn $1 each, as well. Even, Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel makes a whopping $1 per year. But don’t feel bad for Schmidt, Page, Brin or Semel, they are all doing pretty well. Google’s stock has quintupled since the IPO and Schmidt, Page and Brin are incredibly wealthy from it. Poor Terry Semel, the stock of Yahoo is not what it once was, so he must be doing poorly, right? Nope, he received a $25.7 million bonus in 2006, technically earning 80% of what he possibly could of earned, as reported at MarketWatch.com.
But not everyone earns $1. AdAge reports that four top Google executives each received a $250,000 raise, raising their salary to $450,000 each. Plus they shared a bonus of $829,912 in 2006. The four Google executives are:
- Robert Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research;
- Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development;
- Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management; and
- George Reyes, the company’s chief financial officer.
Related Topics: Google: Employees | Yahoo: Employees
The concept of a $1 annual salary is very amusing to me. Do they do this to make themselves appear to be working for free or something? Is there some giant tax benefit here? Does it really please the shareholders to see execs making $1 a year in their annual reports? HAA!! Great post, Barry!
$1 a year… please… this is clearly PR stunts that fail to impress the stockholders…
It’s all in the wording. That’s $1 “Annual Salary”. You can rest assured it doesn’t include ‘Bonuses’ ‘Non-Salary’ items, and all those other nice ‘fringe’ benefits.
But it is a nice gesture nonetheless. :)
–dlp
I doubt they are fooling anyone, especially stock holders.
It is just a tech/money thing.