Guess who is working for free? No, we don’t mean volunteers at nonprofits. We mean corporate CEOs!
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And with CEO salaries already a topic on what is now the presidential campaign trail, CNN Money reports that many well-known CEOs are working gratis—or maybe for just a nominal dollar per year.
The news was that Tesla Motors had announced that Elon Musk, CEO and Product Architect and a Wharton Business School graduate, had not cashed any of the “minimum wage” checks for 2014 totaling $35.365 and, therefore, he had, in essence, made no money at his job last year.
CNN Money also reports that Musk is “very exclusive company” with these other CEOs who were paid $1 in salary last year:
- Sergei Brin and Larry Page of Google
- Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
- John Mackay of Whole Foods
- James Truchard of National Instruments
- Richard Kinder of Kinder Morgan
Other top execs who took dollar salaries in the past are Carl Icahn, Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard, Larry Ellison (then of Oracle), and Richard Hayne of Urban Outfitters.
Of course, CEOs can also have stock, perks, and other options besides salary making up their compensation.
Famously, media mogul Michael Bloomberg never cashed the $1 salary checks he received each
year when he was mayor of the City of New York (although, with Medicare and Social Security taken out, those checks were only worth 93 cents, according to the article).
The key point: “Of course, CEOs can also have stock, perks, and other options besides salary making up their compensation.” Makes the nominal salary a lot less impressive!