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Google Founders Cut Salaries to $1
GeneralCern writes "MSNBC Reports that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt
all slashed their salaries to $1
last year. Since you do not have to pay FICA, Medicare, or income taxes on
the capital gains associated with stock sales, they stand to substantially decrease
their tax burden. Is this a breach of the company's "do no evil" mission
statement, or just an example of people who love their jobs so much they don't
need to be paid to go to work?" Update: 04/09 13:11 GMT by H :And don't trust the above tax lines; it all depends on how sales are done; moreover when you are worth X amount with stock, I suspect the "tax burden" of what is, relatively speaking, a salary that's small compared to networth isn't a substantial impact. Sorry folks; poor story.
How can you expect "do no evil" from a company that patents algorithms.
Nothing to see here
They will get paid by stock options and alike, paying much less taxes for the same income... anyway, I think it is more a PR stunt ("we work because we are fierce of our product") than any other thing...
Why can't
Paying less taxes is funding less evil. What more can one say?
I have long given up my hopes that google will be a "nice" corporation. They have prooven over the last few months that profit is #1, like any other corporation. Like any other corporation: they should not be trusted.
What a ridiculous post. How could you possibly draw an association between minimizing personal income tax and Google turning 'evil'.
When the companies "company" is based on those algorithms how can you not patent them!
Dashboard Widgets
It's just one of the many idiocies that arise from taxing "unearned" income less than "earned" income. Income from all sources should be taxed the same, to avoid giving people reason to come up with complicated schemes to move their income between categories. But given that the tax system sucks, you can't blame people for taking advantage of that fact.
Google has agreed to reimburse Schmidt up to $2.1 million this year for using his jet.
2.1 million seems a little bit higher then $1 to me.
But even so, they're able to survive on google stock. If google's stock goes down, their wage goes down (I'm guessing here, to me stock seems like gambling and make-believe). So they have quite a big incentive to ensure google's stock stays up (wonder how that will impact their do-no-evil mantra). This is nothing but a tax trick, which CEOs are reknown for doing. Of course, no-one here is going to say that avoiding tax is a bad thing. Because everyone pays too much tax as it is. [gripe type="about people who complain about paying tax"]Because stuff like roads are free.[/gripe]
Quit your whining, people. Oh, and look up the "Minimum Alternative Tax" while you're at it. It may have been a good idea at first, but it's getting to be a real mess these days.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Only silly dweebs would think this is "evil". The amount of money they got from their salaries, and the amount of taxes they paid on those saleries, were miniscule compared with their equity in Google stock. They aren't the first wealthy people to take a token salary from the company they founded.
So, get over it. Making Money Isn't Evil.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
To Google, evil means ruining the web experience for its customers and users. Given that Google defines evil as such, it is doing a marvelous job of living up to its promise.
Evil is a subjective concept. To you, and others, perhaps, patents are wrong. But to Google, the sole criterion for evil is the user experience. Therefore, patent issues do not apply.
Look up these words: complex, nuance.
THANK YOU!!
Amazing how many people are willing to leap to the "GOOGLE IS EVIL" conclusion without thinking it through.
(1) These guys are all billionaires. Saving a few hundred thousand dollars on taxes is very unlikely to be their main motivation.
(2) Their absolute income will still go DOWN, regardless of how much they save in taxes. It would be a pretty poor move to quit your job just so you could save on taxes!
I think they are just saying, "Hey, we're rich. We don't really need this money so screw it."
Not really a big deal, but definitely not evil either.
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
> Does the US have a minumum wage?
We have a minimum wage for hourly employees, but there's a loophole: salaried
employees (those paid by the month or by the year irrespective of how many
hours they work) are, as near as I can determine, completely exempt from it.
I haven't actually read the law, but it seems that when a formerly hourly
employee gets promoted to a salaried position, they always seem to suddenly
go from working 35-39 hours a week (because after 40 you have to pay an hourly
employee half again his regular hourly wage) to more like 60 hours/week once
they're salaried. *Maybe* this is just employers taking advantage of workers
who don't know the law well enough to know they can complain, but I suspect
it's an actual loophole.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You are right we do. Next time you think about the high cost of ... education, know that you paid your share for it and the directors of google, who make a 1000 times what I or I am guessing you make, did not. That is but one example. If googles rich wanted to make a tax statement, they could have found a way through gifts etc... to make the low paid at their company pay less taxes. What they did is to increase (theoretically) everyone elses tax burden by not paying their own. What they did is evil
Talk about false premises, your statement assumes that the Google guys are going to be selling their stock sometime soon. If you'd RTFA, you'd know that Page and Brin earned 150K a year, and Schmidt earned 250K/year. Cutting their salaries to $1 does mean a substantial tax savings, as the poster indicated.
Not that it really matters when you're worth what these guys are worth. I think they're doing it as a statement, not to save a few inconsequential thousand dollars in taxes.
Your attempt to politicize the issue is really scummy.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I am an organism. The sole point of my existence is to reproduce. I'm not a monk.
I have urges that must be met, enormous balls and need to get laid. Its going to be in my interest to get funky.
yes and the poster has their head up their ass too. Read
the article. Two were making 150k the other 250k a year.
Given the large wealth they have in the stock do you think
they really give a rats about 60K in taxes?
Does the poster think the same thing about Steve Jobs?
When high ranking execs take no salary it is to say to the
shareholders 'we only do well for ourself if we do well for
you'. The could easily have turned around and said the
company is a success we should be getting paid at least
1M in salary a year, sucking cash out of the company instead
of the stock market.
Slashdot posters need to spend less time at democraticunderground.com and dailykos
I'm sorry, it's doing evil. How can you patent a mathematical expression? That's like patenting a statement of truth! I outright denounce any patenting of mathematical expressions, which includes, but is not limited to, encryption methods and software. You shouldn't be able to patent a philosophical expression. What if "I think therefore I am" had been patented by Descartes?
> Since you do not have to pay FICA, Medicare, or
...or just an example of people who love their
> income taxes on the capital gains associated
> with stock sales, they stand to substantially
> decrease their tax burden.
This is true. One does not pay taxes on income that one does not receive.
> Is this a breech of the company's "do no evil"
> mission statement...
Sigh. If they had kept their salaries they would have received salary income, paid taxes on it, and _also_ made money on stock sales. Now they will only make money on stock sales (and pay the relevant taxes). How is the latter more "evil" than the former?
>
> jobs so much they don't need to be paid to go
> to work?"
It is an example of how some people have chosen to manage their money. I know damn well that if you could rearrange your income so as to increase the amount left after taxes you would.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yup.
... um ...
/. can do better than this.
So far this year we've had lots of advertisements for Thinkgeek, fud about google at every turn, fud about microsoft, stupid stories that the GPL is going to require companies to pay money
You know, I am one of the first people who used/read slashdot. You can tell, you know, by the 4 digit user number.
Slashdot is sucking. Hard. Its been bad for at least 2-3 years now. Its not getting any better. Regurgitating stories that are from The Register/Engaged/Ars Technica/etc is NOT news for nerds! Its not even news when its 4 DAYS OLD!. If I wanted a syndicated news site, I'd go to one of the 5000 that are out there, or just do an RSS feed of what I want, NOT have it delayed by Slashdot - with editorials that twist the story or even miss the point.
COME ON.
Agree with parent 100%.
The way it's spent, sending money to the US Government is evil, so Google's "no evil" policy
requires them to avoid as much tax as possible.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
How did this modded as "insightful"? By shifting their entire salary to stock options, the Google directors are not avoiding a single "education" tax. Education is paid for out of the general fund (partially from standard income tax). They'll still be paying this tax! (See capital gains on stocks/options) The taxes they'd be avoiding (social security, medicare, etc) are all HEALTH and RETIREMENT taxes, they have nothing to do with education.
You guys *are* a bunch of looters.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Who says compassion is dead? That the system's broken? After all they're giving their fair share! Just because Social Security and Medicare are in crisis, why do they deserve a percentage of poor Sergey's, Larry's, and Eric's stock sales?
How is keeping earnings evil? Everybody, yourself included, seems to think that any attempt by Google to make money is evil. You are wrong. To be evil is to do things like run ugly ads on your webmail and charge people money to remove them, or, worse, to accept payment for changes in PageRank. If they can find a legitimate and doable way to increase their profits, it's a good thing, because they have more money to fund stuff and their shareholders are happy. Pleasing your shareholders is not evil unless it is at the expense of your customers.
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Yes, it seems that either a huge number of the article submittters, or one of the editors really has it out to prove google wrong about "not being evil". Kinda bizzare if you ask me. When google turns evil, we'll know it, because it won't be some little thing like guys cutting salaries.
If they are only getting $1 p.a. salary, then the only way they're going to be able to afford to eat is to sell stock. Assuming the US tax system is similar enough to how Australia works, I'd think that the proceeds of the stock sales would be taxed very similarly to the way salary income would is, and therefore would be paying for the same government services that anybody else would be. IOW, I'd doubt they are avoiding tax at all.
What you are worth, and what money you have available to spend are two different things. For example, Bill Gates might be worth $60B, however, the only way he could spend that (assuming he actually could), is to sell off his major ownership of Microsoft. Quite obviously (or maybe it isn't to most slashdotters?), he wouldn't have $60B cash sitting in his bank account, waiting for him to hit the ATM.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I'll have to admit that I've been considering to stop paying my federal taxes recently in protest of all the crap that is going on with the federal government. Its not just the war in Iraq, but many other things as well. However, I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine last night and I asked him about people who do that and he said that it unfortunately doesn't work and that the cases are pretty funny. He's going to send me one so I might share it on my website once I've read it.
I'm not trying to get out of paying taxes, I just think that the way the U.S. is spending our taxes is becoming more and more immoral. What I was going to do, is stop paying my federal taxes (and keep paying state and local) and then take that $10,000 a year that goes towards federal and donate it towards local schools or community projects. So I would just be controlling where my tax money is spent.
It's good for everyone if money is spent rather than sat upon.
That all depends on the state of the economy. It's not good for everyone if you're in demand driven inflation. Then you want everyone to save and not spend.
But given the fact that Americans really enjoy their right to consume I doubt you could steer many towards not consuming.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
How can you patent a mathematical expression?
The same way you patent anything else, and for the same reasons. If I am some company, like Google, and I pay people money to spend time thinking up algorithms, it's only fair that I get to use them exclusively for a while. I paid for them, after all. Otherwise, there's no motivation outside of the goodness of my heart for me to keep mathematicians on my payroll.
Anyway, just why, besides what appears to be sincere but baseless moral indignation, shouldn't people be able to hold patents on mathematical expressions? (Please remember, patents aren't forever.)
Also, what's the real difference between holding a patent on performing a chemical reaction in a particular way to increase yields and holding a patent on an algorithm to make web searches provide better results? Is chemistry somehow less real or less true just because it isn't purely intellectual? It seems to me that chemistry is as "owned in common" as philosophy or mathematics. Are you opposed to patents altogether?
You can and should patent a mathematical expression when your competitors can patent it as well and put you out of a job.
It's not Google's or even Amazon's or Microsoft's fault, per se. It's the ridiculous parody of a patent system we have. If they allow companies to patent knives, spoons and forks then companies pretty much have to patent them to survive.
----Also - it is stupid to say that accepting one dollar is a tax avoidance scheme. Earning less is always and option but not a smart way to lower your tax bill. Refusing to accept a salary because 37% of it (or whatever the top rate is) will go to the IRS is sort of silly if you are trying to maximize your after tax salary. After all 63% of it (minus state income tax) is still yours. You have more not less by accepting the salary.------
that's only true if you're not in a position where you can funnel funds to you by other means instead of taking the salary - obviously you need to have a lot of power inside a company to be able to bargain such things, for example if you'd like a private jet instead of salary(a jet which might very well cost more than your salary would be so you would still be 'winning' in the bargain).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Unfortunately, if they don't patent it, someone who sees what Google does will patent it, and try to get money out of Google.
While Googles prior art would be a solid defense, it would still be a fair amount of money and time to fight the frivolous claim. As long as the attacker makes sure to ask for less than the court case would cost, theres a decent chance Google would settle just to make them go away.
If Google has it patented, however, the potential attacker won't be able to get a patent to attack Google with. And on the off chance the patent office screws up and issues a duplicate patent, Google would be much more likely to get the case dismissed if they can wave an actual patent, rather than simply internal records, in the judges face. That substantially lowers the financial and time investment to fight a claim, when you can expect a dismissal in the event of a truly frivolous claim.
If I were to come up wiht a brilliantly innovative algorithm, I'd patent it. I'd also immediately turn around and license it for use with Open Source software- probably would declare it royalty free for any OSI approved license.
These days, you *need* to patent your algorithms or you can get screwed hard by the system. It's like the Cold War and MAD... if you don't have it, you'll get destroyed, so you need to ensure you can destroy your opponent too.
There are two reasons to patent something:
1) to prevent your competitors from using your tech without paying
2) to prevent them from developing the tech you developed first, patenting it, and then trying to leverage that. Take note, Carmack vs. Creative.
In case 2, they *could* cite prior art, but that assumes they've already been sued, are in court, and probably had operations suspended using the algorithm in question. Pain in the ass, and loss of revenue stream. Sure, Carmack could've taken Creative to court, but they chose their timing carefully...just a few days before the release of Doom 3. If he'd fought, it wouldn't have been on shelves, automatically making the figth much more expensive for him than for creative, regardless of who "won". Easier to just settle, even if you are in the right.
Anyway, just because most of us disagree with how the US patent system is set up doesn't mean we can hold every company that patents something as evil. Under our system, sometimes it is defensive. When Google starts suing, that'll be something.
So companies should invest gobs and gobs of money in R&D when the only thing preventing their having nothing to show for it is the trustworthiness and/or fear of reprisal of every individual employee with damaging knowledge?
This also ignores the fact that many companies derive income from licensing their technologies.
Talk about false premises, your statement assumes that the Google guys are going to be selling their stock sometime soon.
That one buck a year they're earning doesn't go very far. Chances are they'll liquidate some stock every year for income, and have to pay capital gains on that.
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that Page and Brin earned 150K a year, and Schmidt earned 250K/year.Cutting their salaries to $1 does mean a substantial tax savings, as the poster indicated.
Going from $150,000 to $1 is a 99.99933333% reduction in salary, so unless they were paying 99.9994% in taxes, there's no savings.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
But one thing you've really got to like about this story is the way Hemos handled it.
- He apologized for the error.
- He issued a correction.
- He did both in a timely manner.
I don't mind an occassional slip or error as long as they handle it as professionally as Hemos handled this one.The original reason for the apportionment was to approximate a tax on net assets under the Articles of Confederation! During the early stages of the country the distribution of asset value was very much dependent on the presence of population to turn natural resource, primarily land, to productivity. Rather than trying to track everyone down and assess their property values, the States were essentially taxed on their populations.
So if the Congress wants, it can go back to the simple system of directly taxing just States.
Alternatively it can even go to a more rational system of just charging reinsurance fees to the States for the cost of underwriting defense of property rights and let the States, as regulators of premiums within their own jurisdictions, figure out how to tax assets appropriately.
Seastead this.
Funny, I had always thought slavery involved restricting freedom, not giving people choices.
English is easier said than done.
Taking off the rose-colored glasses for a minute, you'll notice many of those who are rich have obtained their wealth through means other than hard work, be it exploitation of others or inheritance. For example, a significant portion of the top 20 wealthiest people in the world is composed of Sam Walton benefactors.
:P
The idea not only can anyone become rich if they work hard, but that everyone who is currently rich has gotten there through determination and a lot of elbow grease is just a way to jerk off egos.
That being said - the idea to tax the rich proportionally higher than the poor is not to support a robin-hood system of wealth redistribution, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that rich people are able shoulder a greater portion of the burden. There are enough loopholes in the system to get out of it if you *really* don't like paying taxes. Of course, to find all the loopholes, you need to have enough money to pay someone to do your taxes
"So I would just be controlling where my tax money is spent."
They have a term for controlling where you money is spent. It's called a "free market".
So how do you propose to allow people to support themselves? Allowing a person to work a job which cannot possibly support them is equivalent to slavery.
You fail to understand slavery. Slavery is a deprivation of freedom, not of conditions. Historically, some slaves have lived very comfortable lives -- but they were still slaves.
The cost of living has been going up all over the country. The price of food has gone up significantly; In my area eggs have gone up about 25%, milk about that as well, cheese by about 30% or more... and this over just a couple of years.
I'm amazed to hear that "the cost of living" is tied exclusively to the price of dairy products. And further, that inflation is somehow a new and unprecedented thing; that prices haven't increased ~2000% in the past hundred years or so.
If the minimum wage doesn't increase, then a lot of people who are stuck making it will just end up homeless and in amazing amounts of debt. This is not particularly good for the country.
It isn't a particularly good thing for anyone to be earning the minimum wage, no matter what it is. The fact is that less than 3% of the workforce earns minimum wage, and that number has been in decline for as long as it's been measured (since 1979).
And in that time, prices have gone up 283% while the minimum wage has only increased 170%.
So, unless you think the country has been in a perpetual crisis for the past 25 years, I think a better solution is to decrease the number of people earning the minimum wage.
No, it is not. Allowing a person to work any type of job is clearly distinct from slavery. Providing someone with a job which cannot possibly support him is crappy, but even that is not slavery.
Forcing someone to work a job that pays enough for two people is closer to slavery than allowing a person to work a job that doesn't support him.
Do you have an alternate solution to raising the minimum wage?
No, but clearly the minimum wage should be raised in response to, not in anticipation of, a higher cost of living, as you have said. A higher standard of living, however, does not approach placing a person into slavery.
I think what you are attempting to refer to is the idea that employees be recorded as an asset. Certainly in many companies, the biggest asset is the people who work there and the knowledge in their heads. Some feel that capital should be reflected on the balance sheet. Under this concept, they still would not show up as a revenue stream. However, even with assets we don't attempt to "maximize" them in terms of cash outflow. ("What? This new office building is only going to cost us $80 million? Let's try to max that out! I'm sure we can pay at least $100 million.)
Also, as a nefarious motive, the salary expense doesn't cut it. I don't know Google specifics but I'd assume that most of their income is stock options. I'm pretty sure most of the accounting changes are now in place that would require those options to be expensed as well. And their salary was a trivial percentage of Google's expenses anyway.
I know you're just a troll, but here goes:
:rolleyes:
- x86 or. x86? Big-black-box maker or Big-white-box maker? I'm so glad I have choices there!
Download from [Microsoft-compatible music store; ie Napster, etc.] and you're locked in to PlaysForSure players. You get "choice" of a dozen or so players that all fail in one or more ways to the iPod.
- Forcing... wait, stop right there. You're talking about APPLE forcing things upon people, compared to Microsoft?! What the hell?!
Windows Activation. Built-in apps to force out competition. War agains Open Source. Insecure OS that forces users to buy Antivirus/Anti-spyware/etc.
Microsoft NEVER forces anything upon users, let alone kids in Superbowl commercials