Google's top brass keep $1 salaries amid turmoil
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 25 March 2009, 22:37 IST   |    1 Comments
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San Francisco: Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin maintained their traditional salaries of $1 last year even as the recession has pulled down the value of their combined stakes in the Internet search leader by nearly $26 billion. Schmidt, Page and Brin were insisting on their annual salaries remaining at $1 since Google went public in 2004. The trio also don't get any bonuses or the stock awards that most of Google's other 20,000 employees receive. Page and Brin are Google's largest stockholders with about 29 million shares apiece. These two people made Schmidt, 53, a major shareholder when they hired him as CEO in 2001. Schmidt received perquisites valued at $508,763 last year, mostly to cover personal security bills totaling $402,562. Google also paid a total of $106,201 to fly his family and friends on airplanes chartered by the Mountain View, California-based company. Schmidt's 2008 compensation package including perks edged up six percent from 2007 when his package totaled $478,662. Limiting their salaries to $1 didn't seem like a big sacrifice for Schmidt, Brin and Page until 2008 because they became multibillionaires as their holdings in Google soared eight-fold between the time of the company's initial public offering in August 2004 and the end of 2007. Although all three men remain among the world's wealthiest people, they suffered a major setback last year. Combined, their fortunes plunged by a combined $25.8 billion, or nearly 56 percent, in 2008, as investors began to fret that Google would be hurt by the faltering economy. Google held up better than many people feared as its revenue rose 38 percent to $21.8 billion, but the company's stock price still plummeted from $691.48 at the close of 2007 to $307.65 at the end of last year. The steep decline in Google's market value prompted the company to recently decrease its employees' cost to exercise a total of 7.64 million stock options. The re-pricing gives the 15,642 who participated in the program a better chance to strike it rich in future years.