Mark Zuckerberg And Other CEOs Making $1 Per Year

Along with official launch of Facebook's IPO Wednesday came the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be reducing his annual salary to just one dollar beginning next year -- and he's far from the first such CEO to make that decision.

That's not to say they're all working for nothing. Due to stock options and awards, CEOs who cut their salaries to a single dollar (or less) often make just as much as most others once accounting for equity, according to a March 2011 study from the Fisher College of Business. The study examined 50 CEOs making a buck or less ever year from 1992 to 2005 and found that due to stock options and other awards, dollar CEOs on average still netted $2 million in other compensation while giving up a median salary of $610,000.

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, owns 28.2 percent of a company expected to be worth $75 and $100 billion. At those levels, a couple hundred thousands dollars is just chump change.

And then there are the company benefits of the dollar-per-year idea first adopted by Chrysler's revered former CEO Lee Iacocca in the late 1970s. Any CEO whose compensation is so deeply rooted in stock performance has a personal incentive to raise that stock's price, according to FORTUNE. Another study of dollar CEO compensation also found the announcement of the pay cut can often produce "significant positive short-term market reaction."

But while executives like Google's Larry Page and New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg have maintained dollar salaries for years, others have used it during times of crisis. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit voluntarily lowered his salary to a single dollar in the aftermath of the financial crisis, for example.

Here are 10 executives with annual salaries of a single dollar at most:

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Comments

[Scurvydog74]

10:49 PM on 02/04/2012

So he pays 35% of that one dollar and 15% of the rest of the millions he gets in stock and options minus all the deductions he can surely take for everything from mortgage interest to dental work. Brilliant move...

[Philclock]

10:03 PM on 02/04/2012

People can keep and grow wealth WITHOUT generating income.

Get the picture, Democrats and "progressives"??

The despicable income tax is not only immoral, allowing politicians and their cronies into our bedrooms and discouraging our willingness to work hard and generate wealth and income; IT ALSO DOESN'T WORK, as your favorite tool for social engineering, picking winners and losers.

[keemia]

03:53 PM on 02/04/2012

Come on people, it's all about paying the 15% tax rate on capital gains (from the stocks) vs paying 25-30% on salaries like the rest of working people.

[thamilton33]

03:33 PM on 02/04/2012

Mark Zuckerberg's name is spelt incorrectly in the Slideshow, FYI

[MrOnePercent2012]

01:54 PM on 02/04/2012

Mark might have an IRS problem. If a company tries to disguise a fair salary by paying stock options instead then he will avoid paying social security taxes on say $200,000 just to pick a number. That may be peanuts for Mark but the IRS might want that tax anyway.

[MrOnePercent2012]

01:45 PM on 02/04/2012

Good for Mark.
You progressives should aspire to do something like this fine lad has done as opposed to draw your unemployment welfare check each week.

[AbrahamMcLemore]

12:35 PM on 02/04/2012

That $1 salary is taxed as ordinary income. Same as our salaries.
So they ARE paying their fair share like the rest of us.

[Warren Lauzon]

12:16 PM on 02/04/2012

Zuckerberg supposedly will owe $1.69 billion in taxes when the company goes public. If his stock is worth $25 billion, that is a nice low tax rate. And yet others are paying an astounding 102% tax rate http://finance.yahoo.com/news/102-tax-rate-takes-cake-160010322.html

Anyone think that the tax codes and laws are totally screwed up?

[MrOnePercent2012]

01:46 PM on 02/04/2012

You just need to be familiar with their in's and out's.

[Earlegirl]

10:57 AM on 02/04/2012

Headline on lead-in page spells is "doller." Geez.

[BringthePaine]

10:42 AM on 02/04/2012

Why pay income tax rates when you can pay capital gain rates?

[Jelly Jam]

06:29 PM on 02/03/2012

You know it SOUNDS nice to say that you're not receiving a pay check because you're just so rich that you don't need it. It sounds great, especially if you're reinvesting that money into your employees & their salaries/benefits as well as the business.

But, no shade, Mark Zuckerberg is still going to be making millions off facebook through investments. How much are those earnings being taxed (to be returned to our economy and communities)? About 15%? But if Mark Zuckerberg was getting a salary, how much would those earnings get taxed? About 35%? So we're losing like 20% of the revenue that could go towards rejuvenating our country. I'm not saying Mark Zuckerberg is trying to evade taxes or whatever, but this story doesn't make me smile. It makes me frown at our backwards tax code and brackets and how we're losing money that could be better spent on public works (education, health care, parks, research, etc.) and infrastructure (better high-speed communication networks, roads, bridges, water systems, etc.)

We need to return to taxing the highest earners 39% and we need to increase taxes on investments, i.e. up to like 30-35%.

[MrOnePercent2012]

01:47 PM on 02/04/2012

Bad idea, Jelly.

[Jelly Jam]

02:05 PM on 02/04/2012

Explain, please.

[MichaelMcKLA]

04:38 PM on 02/03/2012

I wonder if those are Katzenberg's real teeth.

[MrOnePercent2012]

01:47 PM on 02/04/2012

Who cares?

[Cynthia Morse Linton]

03:53 PM on 02/03/2012

There is a false assumption being made that encouraging the stock price is necessarily the best thing for the company. That's often very short-term thinking.

[bogey1]

03:36 PM on 02/03/2012

and don't vetting of stock options get taxed at a lower rate since they are investments instead of salary?

[Liberal2009]

05:32 PM on 02/03/2012

Bingo!

[jeremyemilio]

03:36 PM on 02/03/2012

Zuckerberg just issued around $80 billion in stock for a company that made somewhere around $3.5 billion last year and, considering the profitable lifespan of .com corporations, is unlikely to make $80 billion in profit in the lifetime of the company. He owns 30% of that stock, which means he could sell out tomorrow for around $25 billion and walk away with 2-3 times what the company has ever made to this date, and possibly quite possibly as much as the company will ever make in real profit.

And he will still be hailed as someone who ADDED to the wealth of the nation (math be d@mn3d).

Just sayin'.

[Liberal2009]

05:32 PM on 02/03/2012

Short it.

[MrOnePercent2012]

01:48 PM on 02/04/2012

How much have you added?
LOL

[jeremyemilio]

05:15 PM on 02/04/2012

A lot more than I've taken away, you can depend upon that. I've worked on a farm, creating a lot more food than I ever ate, worked in a meat packaging plant packaging a lot more meat than I ever ate, picked tonnes more apples than I ever ate, and more recently have taught hundreds of students at the high school and university levels, helping to transform them into productive members of society. Again, you can argue with the math all you like, but if you are the average factory worker, you are adding to the economy (i.e. Your compensation is LESS THAN the wealth that you create), and if you are a guy like Zuck, then you are subtracting from the economy (i.e. Your compensation is MORE THAN the wealth that you create). Zuckerberg just received $25 billion in compensation for his role in a company that made a total of $3.5 billion dollars last year.

'Rich' is not always synonymous with 'productive.' It's pretty tired to always hear people pretend that it is.

Just to be clear, if you and Zuck are 'Atlas,' and 'Atlas' would just get on with it and shrug, we'd all be a lot better off ($21.5 billion better off, to be exact).

Facts is facts.