Google's Outrageous 2007 Compensation Revealed

> Not to nitpick, but how do you spend $474,662 on security?

Seems damn easy to me. How much does some security technology + bodyguards cost? I'm sure Larry/Sergey have at least as much security, but apparently they're covering the cost. I recall Ellison's security was into the millions.

When you're worth billions of dollars, what's the point in having a million dollar salary.

It is outrageos!!! It is just another way to skip paying taxes. If you have a salary, you have to pay 12% on payroll taxes (for the first 102k), plus 9.25% CA taxes, and probably 32% personal income taxes.

What they are getting, is security, housing, travel expenses to private islands, parties, etc.... all of those end up as "businness expenses", which obviously reduce taxes.

This is a non-story. It might be a slightly interesting point that the top Google executives don't take out salary, but stories like these are never anything but PR stunts. Anyone with half a chimpanzee's brain understands that these numbers don't mean anything. All 3 of them could take a salary of 500 million dollars, and the shareholders would hardly notice. I suppose the goal with stunts like these is to show solidarity with the workers who earn much less, but this rings hollow when each of them has enough stock to buy the family of every employee. I'm not saying it's a problem that these guys have great fortunes, but it seems a bit cowardly for them to pretend that they are actually quite frugal. They are not, by a long shot.

The only thing worth noting is that they only use their own shares for large expenses. But the practical implications of this are miniscule. And in the case of the CEO, these shares were after all issued at a time.

If anything, this just highlights how fucked up our tax system is. Modern executives receive all of their income in the form of stock options so they'll be taxed at the capital gains rate, ensuring that their marginal tax rate is half that of the bottom of the line programmer in their organization.

I had a momentary rush when I thought that they were giving themselves 1000 * sqrt(3) bonuses. But that's $1,732, not $1,723.

Ah, well.

Outrageous!