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Comment by wmorein | Hacker News Reader

Do you really have to pay yourself "reasonable" compensation? I don't doubt that you were told that, but it is interesting that multiple CEOs of large, public companies (e.g. Brin/Schmidt/Page at Google, Jobs at Apple) pay themselves $1 per year.

See proxy statements at http://edgarest.com/company/name/1288776/Google_Inc_ and http://edgarest.com/company/name/320193/APPLE_INC for reference.

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I think the difference is the fact that these are public companies where CEO compensation is mainly in the form of stock grants or options. My guess is that the IRS doesn't want people claiming $1 salaries and then writing off a bunch of "business" expenses like family trips to Hawaii or stuff like that.

That's because those companies are large and public, and the equity they have in the company makes an annual salary unnecessary.

I don't see how that applies in this situation.

In Jobs's specific case, for a while he held no equity and also drew no salary.

The names you listed read like the definition of "outlier". If you paid attention only to the salaries that are often mentioned in the press, you would probably see these four, and a handful of those infamous Fortune 500 CEOs who see compensation on the order $30+ million.

Taking an average from that sample, I guess you'd want to pay yourself $15,000,000.50.

You can't start an S-Corp and distro out all your compensation instead of paying payroll taxes on it. You can pay yourself $1 a year if you want to, but that needs to be all you pay yourself, or you're evading taxes.

(I'm in the same boat as this poster, but I think the S-Corp salary vs. distro thing is a big scam).

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