Mark Zuckerberg founder and CEO of worlds largest social media site is taking $1 salary this year. According to UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is taking $1 salary this year and foregoing any bonuses.
He is on saying, “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” and isn’t really beholden to shareholders, since he controls a majority of proxy votes.
The $1 salary is symbolic. Companies have to compensate all of their employees, so working for free is out of the question — and doesn’t $1 sound better, anyway? Since the first dot-com boom, getting paid $1 has become something of a tradition among extremely wealthy executives whose compensation instead comes in the form of stock.
Steve Jobs famously took a $1 salary from the time he returned to Apple as CEO in 1998; he didn’t take any stock grants after 2003, either. In 2005, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with then-CEO Eric Schmidt, all reduced their salaries to $1. Schmidt, now executive chairman, takes a salary of several million dollars these days; Page, now CEO, and Brin still make $1.
Other tech CEOs who belong to the $1 salary club include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, and HP’s Meg Whitman. Yahoo’s Jerry Yang was making $1 before he was ousted as CEO last year. Outside of Silicon Valley, CEOs of American companies who made $1 in salary last year include Capital One’s Richard Fairbank, Urban Outfitters’ Richard Hayne, Fossil’s Kosta Kartsotis, Kinder Morgan’s Richard Kinder and Duke Energy’s James Rogers.
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