Mark Zuckerberg cuts salary to $1 a year

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will take a huge pay cut and join the $1 elite salary club, according to a filing at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the American media has reported.

Zuckerberg will forego all bonuses too. The $1 salary is to satisfy the statutory requirement that companies should pay all their employees. Zuckerberg reportedly earned about $1.9 million in annual compensation in 2012, including $503,000 in base pay, about $266,000 as bonus and $1.22 million in “other compensation”.

Zuckerberg joins a long line of high-profile CEOs who have gone for a symbolic salary of $1 a year. Apple’s Steve Jobs had famously cut his salary to $1 in 1998 when he returned to the company.

Lee Iacocca is the founder of this club, when as chairman of Chrysler in 1978, he asked his employees to take a salary cut and led by example by opting for a buck a year as salary. Others include Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, John Mackey of Whole Foods and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

The techies have been particularly fascinated by this. Google’s Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin started getting $1 a year in the mid-2000s.

So how is Zuckerberg going to live on a buck a year? Well, he got $2.3 billion last year when he cashed out 60 million stock options. And surely, there will be more to bank on.