Do Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg really only have a $1 salary?

Elon Musk (Tesla), Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, in the photo with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google) or, in his day, Steve Jobs (Apple), despite being executive directors of the most powerful companies in the world, which they founded, all claim to only give themselves one dollar salaries.

Other businessmen, such as Warren Buffett, opted for a salary similar to their employees, in this case $100,000 per year, as confirmed by the Ubiminds portal.

It is worth remembering that the pioneers of this measure in the early 2000s were James Barksdale (Netscape), John Chambers (Cisco), Larry Ellison (Oracle, in the photo) or Tom Siebel (Siebel Systems). Still, in just over a decade, it became a trend, as the 'Los Angeles Times' reported at the time.

Many people wonder where the trick is, and the reality is that there is no trick; their salary really is just one dollar.

Photo: Pexels - Cottonbro Studio

Another thing is the additional bonuses and premiums, where these businessmen pocket millions and millions of benefits.

The CEOs of these companies set their salary at a symbolic dollar because of the taxation that work income faces, that is, the amount of money that the public treasury keeps from that salary, in many cases, above 50%.

On the other hand, financial investments have a much lower tax burden, which is why the CEOs of Big Tech prefer that the bulk of their salary comes from bonuses, as reported on the website 'The Stock Dork'.

Thus, the bulk of these entrepreneurs' salaries come in packages of shares whose value, in some cases, is hundreds of millions of dollars.

The most striking case is that of Elon Musk, who in 2018 took home a bonus of $2,283 billion in stock options. His average annual premium in the last five years has been 456.7 million dollars, according to 'The Stock Dork'.

For his part, Sundar Pichai, head of Alphabet, has had to settle for 98.2 million on average in the last five years, which is not bad either.

Andy Jassy (pictured) and Safra Catz, CEOs of Amazon and Oracle, have had similar bonuses, just over $50 million.

Curious to find Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, the most valuable company in the world, with a capitalization above $300 billion, with an average of $43.95 million.

In this sense, the comparative analysis carried out by 'The New York Times' in 2018 is striking, analyzing the difference in salaries between the CEOs of Big Tech and their employees. In the photo, Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle.

Obviously, this comparison did not count the CEO's $1 salary, but rather his multimillion-dollar bonuses. Thus, the top managers of companies such as Oracle or Accenture (in the photo, Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture) earned 1,000 times more than the average of their employees.

In the case of Meta, that amount was 100 times more, since Facebook and company employees earn an average of $230,000 a year, one of the highest among Big Tech companies.

Obviously, even if they do only pay themselves just one dollar a month, with the bonuses and stock shares they recieve, their incomes are easily a 100 or 1,000 times greater than those of their employees.