Google’s $1 Salaries: Bear Baiting Investors

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Steve Jobs of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) used to be the big "$1 a year" salary guy. Now the privilege falls to Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) all of whom were paid just $1 in base salary last year.

Investors don’t appreciate the legerdemain because they are not fools.The $1 salary is fine for billionaires who want to show that they are all for stock-based compensation. For fabulously rich executives the gesture has no meaning. Google’s two founders have $13 billion each in the company’s shares. While the value of that stock has fallen as the shares have come down from $747 to $450, they still cannot buy enough airplanes, homes, or yachts to eat through it.

Google’s shareholders would much rather see their founders and CEO pillage the company the way that most CEOs do. Take out tens of millions of dollars and charge the company for private trips and fancy dinners. Just get the share price back over $700.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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