Apple’s (AAPL) Jobs Worked For $1, But Owns 5.5 Million Shares

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 26, 9:09AM EDT · Published Dec 23, 6:18PM EST

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Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), is doing fine, financially. He took a salary of just $1 last year but owns 5.546 million Apple shares. The stock trades above $200, so Jobs has over $1 billion invested in the company.

The Apple proxy also reports that most of the firm’s top people have to rely on stock holdings and options to do well. Apple N0.2 executive Tim Cook had a base of only $750,000 last year and got an $800,000 bonus. Next year his base will rise to $800,000.

The top four executives other than Jobs had base salaries averaging only $600,000 for 2009, but Cook and the managers who run hardware and software, Peter Oppenehimer and Scott Forstall, each were granted over 12 million stock options.

The only really interesting point in the Apple proxy is that the company’s board wants to increase shares available for employee compensation by 36 million. Apple clearly thinks that it will be richly rewarding management going forward. The proposal for the share increase will certainly pass.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.