You would expect the CEOs who head up some of the world's biggest and most successful companies to have some of the highest salaries on the planet, but often the top job comes with a tiny monthly salary. But most CEOs more than make up for that with a wealth of other financial incentives. Click or scroll through the CEOs with small paycheques, and discover the other ways they get paid.
Richard Fairbank, the co-founder and CEO of commercial bank Capital One, hasn't received a salary for the past 18 years. Instead, the finance entrepreneur has taken his pay in the form of stock options and rewards, and so hasn't done too badly at all out of the no-wage remuneration deal.
Depsite not taking a salary, in 2020 Fairbank's compensation totalled $20.1 million (£14.4m). While most of this came from stock options, $3 million (£2.1m) was given in the form of a bonus. The CEO's wealth was estimated by Bloomberg at around $1.1 billion (£836m) in January 2018 on the back of the increasing share price of the company at that time.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took home salaries of just $1 (72p) annually as CEO and president respectively of Alphabet. In doing so they followed in the footsteps of another Silicon Valley billionaire, the late Steve Jobs, who set the trend when he rejoined Apple in 1997. However, Page and Brin both stepped down from their roles in December 2019.
However, they haven't missed out on Google's success. They have made their money from performance-related stock rewards instead. As two of Alphabet's largest shareholders, Page is worth $100.2 billion (£72bn) and Brin $97.1 billion (£69.8bn), according to Forbes.
The CEO of review platform Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman, has seen his salary shrink. In 2012, he was paid $300,000 (£228k), but that figure dropped to $37,501 (£28.5k) the following year. In 2014 it went down to $1 (72p).
That's not the whole story of course as the Yelp head honcho is entitled to lucrative stock options. In 2019 alone, Stoppelman, who is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was offered more than $6.3 million (£4.5m), an increase on $5.4 million (£3.9m) in 2018.
Another member of the $1 salary club, Mark Zuckerberg took a gigantic pay cut in 2013 when his yearly salary went from $770,000 (£585k) to just one dollar. But don't feel sorry for him. The social media boss raked in $23.4 million (£16.8m) in 2019 through other types of compensation. And there are other perks; Facebook also covers the cost of its CEO's private travel and his security, spending more than $23 million (£16.5m) on it in 2019.
CEOs opt for this sort of drastic pay cut for a number of reasons, one of which is to appease shareholders who may frown on excessively high salaries but don't seem to mind senior execs receiving lavish performance-based share options. Zuckerberg's net worth is currently estimated at $110.4 billion (£79.3bn) according to Forbes.
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Richard Hayne, the co-founder and CEO of hip fashion chain Urban Outfitters, has drawn a $1 (72p) salary since 2010. Hayne does, however, receive a variety of benefits including performance-related rewards. He reportedly received compensation of $1 million (£760k) in 2020. Urban Outfitters has seen its stock price fluctuate in 2020 as a result of COVID-19's impact on the retail industry.
On top of the performance-related bonuses, Hayne holds the majority of the company stock, and with the Urban Outfitters share price currently surging, Hayne is cashing in. His net worth at the time of writing is $1.4 billion (£1bn).
Staying with tech billionaires, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel saw his salary drop to nothing following his company's IPO in June 2017. Before that, the fresh-faced chief exec had drawn a salary of $503,205 (£382k) in 2016.
Spiegel's remuneration package is largely based on stock options and rewards, so his move may not have been quite as shrewd as he hoped given Snap's struggling share price, which has trended downwards since the IPO. That said, in 2017 Spiegel received $638 million (£484.7m), which was a higher payout than any other US CEO, a remarkable fact considering Snap actually lost $720 million (£547m) that year. However, by 2020 his compensation had fallen to $2.09 million (£1.5m). Regardless, Spiegel's current net worth is $11.5 billion (£8.3bn).
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True to his word, Mackey has worked pretty much for free for the past 10 or so years – in terms of a salary anyway. However, the Whole Foods Market boss won't be going broke anytime soon. In 2017 Amazon bought the business for $13.7 billion (£9.8bn) and, due to Mackey's one million shares in the company, he reportedly received $8 million (£5.8m) when that deal went through. Today Mackey is thought to be worth $75 million (£53.9m).
However, because Kean only takes a dollar a year the company has insisted that he must own a certain amount of stock in the business. Kean also forgoes an annual bonus and other CEO staples, but records show the energy infrastructure exec earned a total of $1.1 million (£836k) in 2018 from other types of compensation.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also heads credit card processing company Square and takes home a combined salary of next to nothing for both roles. Dorsey received $1.40 (£1.06) at Twitter in 2018 – a pay raise from zero that he took in the three previous years – but the firm also covers his security, which costs around $70,000 (£53.2k) a year.
Dorsey's salary as CEO of Square amounts to a symbolic $2.75 (£2.09), the maximum percentage the company charges merchants per transaction, and his paycheque is down from the more heady heights of $6,000 (£4.6k) per annum in 2016. Yet Forbes estimated that the CEO made $8 million (£6.1m) by selling Square stock in 2018 alone and today his net worth is a whopping $14.2 billion (£10.2bn). In April 2020 he promised to give away $1 billion (£718m) towards COVID-19 relief in the form of Square stock.
Elon Musk's salary was officially $56,380 (£42.8k) in 2019 to adhere to Californian minimum wage regulations for CEOs, but the Tesla superstar famously refuses it. "I don't cash it in. It just ends up accumulating in a Tesla bank account somewhere," Musk told The Times. He has since moved his car company's headquarters to Texas as of the end of 2020, a move which could see him drop his salary even further. But his real earnings are tied to the electric car-maker's performance – the tech tycoon makes money by hitting a number of challenging financial targets.
If Tesla achieves 12 massively ambitious "Market Capitalization Milestones" and the company surges in value to over $650 billion (£467bn) within the decade, the world's most innovative billionaire will be awarded a cool $55.8 billion (£40.1bn) in stock options. Yet Musk has already unlocked four of these milestones, and this week achieved two more following Tesla's strong last quarter where it sold nearly 185,000 vehicles. This saw the business achieve a quarterly revenue of $10.39 billion (£7.5bn) with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of $1.84 billion (£1.3bn), which has resulted in Musk becoming eligible for stock options worth $11 billion (£7.9bn) for those two achievements alone. Forbes estimates Musk's current net worth at $175 billion (£125.8bn), making him the second richest person in the world.
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