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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.
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?
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.
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; }
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.
Could you describe the things Google has done that are not "nice"?
:-(.
I haven't seen any Google products that aren't pretty darn impressive, and free for use by the public.
Yes, they make their money off advertising, and that's great. It gives us free toys and advertisers get exposure, just like old-fashioned over the air TV.
What's wrong with making money by providing great services? If they lose money, they can't provide the services anymore
D
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.
You guys *are* a bunch of looters.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
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.
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
What is it with you Americans and this dogged obsession with "companies only exist to make money"?
Making money isn't the sole point of a company. Companies exist to fulfil their owners objectives as expressed by the mission statement. A side product of fulfilling those objectives is to make money, because an unprofitable company won't fulfil the objectives for very long.
Money is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Companies exist to make cars, build furniture, produce electricity, sell food, provide services, and literally 1000s of other purposes. Making money is part of that process, but it is not the actual objective.
When CEOs forget the company's objectives and pursue making money, that's when a company fails. Witness what's happening to HP; Carly tried to make more profit at the expense of the companies objectives. Thanks to her, HP might as well be dead. All the brilliance that once embodied "all things HP" has vanished. They are now a hollow shell of their former selves; little more than an expensive kind of Dell. Companies that focus on their objectives make money without even trying; look at Google.
For an even better example, look at Apple. In the mid-90s, during the absence of Steve, Apple lost sight of their objective; building the best personal computers. They started to produce some godawful crap like the PowerMac 4400. They wanted to make more money by producing a "cheap Mac" and selling to a larger audience. Combined with a whole lot of other boneheaded schemes to "make money quick", Apple almost went bankrupt. That's because the guys in charge never understood what Apple was all about.
Steve comes back and reinstates his vision of producing the best personal computers. Bam, Apple is back in the black and the industry darling again. Is Steve a brainiac? No. Is he just lucky? No. He simply knows to focus on the company's core objectives and that's why Steve's companies always succeed. Whether he's at Pixar or Apple, he pursues the objectives first, knowing full well that the money will come after.
Stop pursuing the money. Counterintuitively that's not how you make money! Make a great product, or provide a great service, and money will come naturally. That's how great companies and great people manage to succeed.