Friday, April 13, 2007

Poor wages - Rich pickings

Do they think we are stupid ?

Search engine giant Google only paid its three executives , chief executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin , just salaries of $1 in 2006, accounts show.

I am sure they dont require a wage since Mr Brin, president of technology , has shares in Google worth $13.2 billion , Mr Page had shares totalling $13.4 billion and Mr Schmidt's shares were worth $4.9 billion by year end. Mr Schmidt's "other compensation", was $555,742 mostly for "personal security" as was Mr Page's $36,795.
Another perk was Mr Schmidt's corporate jet, also used by the other executives.

This trick of computer giants paying executives low wages was previous done by Yahoo with their boss Terry Semel who had his annual salary reduced to $1 .
Mr Semel had reaped $429 million (£228m) from his shares in the firm since 2003 . Under the latest contract which runs until 2008, Mr Semel will be eligible to an annual bonus of up to one million stock options. His previous annual salary was $600,000. Over the past three years Mr Semel sold 18.1 million of his stock options for a gain of $429m. He maintains another 17.7 million unexercised stock options.

Who do they think they are fooling ?

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