Yahoo CEO Content With $1 Salary
In order to make things a bit easier on the company and its employees the CEO’s of Yahoo and Apple are taking a serious pay cut. Yahoo released an amendment to their annual report that showed CEO Jerry Yang was paid only $1 during 2007. Likewise CEO of Apple – Steve Jobs – was also paid a salary of $1.
Yang, 39, didn’t receive a bonus, stock options or any other rewards to supplement his $1 salary during a year in which Yahoo’s earnings fell by 12 percent while its stock price shed 9 percent. Already the company’s “Chief Yahoo,” Yang became CEO last June in the midst of deepening slump. The downturn battered Yahoo’s stock price, opening a window for Microsoft Corp. to make a takeover bid that Yang is resisting.
Yang replaced Terry Semel, whose 2006 compensation package of $71.7 million infuriated shareholders who believed he was being unjustly rewarded while the company lost ground in the rapidly expanding Internet advertising market. Paychecks aren’t that important to Yang because he has made a fortune through the years selling some of his stock in Yahoo, which he started in 1994 with Stanford University classmate David Filo. Yang still owns a 3.9 percent stake in Yahoo that is currently worth $1.5 billion.