Google Execs Say No to Raise
Saying “no, thanks” to a raise must be easier when you’re a billionaire.
Google Inc.’s chief executive and two founders turned down a salary hike offered by the board of directors for a job well done in 2004 -- a year in which they took the Internet company public and watched the stock price soar as high as $216.80 a share.
Even as other Google executives received hefty bonuses, CEO Eric Schmidt and Presidents Larry Page and Sergey Brin each asked for annual salaries of $1. They also earned holiday bonuses of $1,556, according to a proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
Even so, they’re not hurting for money.
As of March 28, Schmidt owned 13.9 million shares, Page owned 36.5 million and Brin owned 36.4 million. On Friday, Google’s stock fell $1.71 to $192.05 on Nasdaq, leaving the CEO worth $2.7 billion and each founder worth $7 billion.
Schmidt had been drawing an annual salary of $250,000, and Page and Brin had each been earning $150,000 a year. They stopped taking a salary in the second quarter of last year.
Eschewing a regular paycheck isn’t unprecedented. Corporate chiefs who have taken $1 salaries include Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison, PepsiCo Inc.’s Roger Enrico and Apple Computer Inc.’s Steve Jobs.
But it’s mostly done as a symbolic gesture at struggling companies to encourage investors that the CEO believes better times are ahead.
And it’s often accompanied by other perks, such as the private jet Apple gave Jobs, the bonuses and stock Pepsi gave Enrico and the 40 million stock options Oracle awarded Ellison in 2000.
At Google, where revenue doubled to $3.2 billion and profit soared to $399 million last year, executives seemed to be sending a different message: Who needs the money?
“These guys could command -- or demand -- multimillion-dollar salaries and nobody would question it,” said Bill Coleman, senior vice president of compensation for Salary.com Inc., a Needham, Mass.-based consulting firm. “But in their subtle little Berkeley kind of way, they’re saying, ‘Hey, corporate America, follow our lead.’ Good for them.”
