This Is the Lowest Paid CEO in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 26, 7:44AM EDT · Published Apr 24, 6:59AM EDT

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This Is the Lowest Paid CEO in America — © Phillip Faraone / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

For years, CEO pay has caused a battle at many companies between board members and shareholders. Board members say chief executive officers are rate commodities, trained for years to run some of America’s largest public companies. Many shareholders and public activists do not see why CEOs should make hundreds of times more than schoolteachers and firefighters. One public company CEO made $211,131,206 last year, the highest among all CEOs of S&P 500 corporations.

Not every CEO has a huge pay package. Some work for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of these are large shareholders in their own companies. Warren Buffett, of Berkshire Hathaway, is an example. However, he is one of the richest men in the world. For part of his tenure as chief executive of Apple, Steve Jobs was paid a base of only $1. However, he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, at least. His successor, on the other hand, Tim Cook, has had huge pay packages.

Two CEOs took only a $1 in total composition last year, according to company proxies. These proxies were examined for 24/7 Wall St. by MyLogIQ, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to screen public company documents.

The first of the two is Jack Dorsey, head of Twitter. He is the rare CEO of two public companies. The other is Square, the payment system company. Dorsey took a $1 salary at Twitter in 2020 and took no other compensation in stock, stock options or bonus. The figure was actually $1.40, the same as in 2019 and 2018. Dorsey owns slightly less than 3% of Twitter’s stock.

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The other public company CEO to take only $1 is Steven Kean of Kinder Morgan. He also took this as a salary and got no additional compensation. Kean took only $7,270 in total compensation in 2019. Kean owns less than 1% of Kinder shares, or 7,210,598.

Both CEOs could make the case that they should have been paid more. It is unlikely either lobbied his board. In both cases, investors got a break.

Special thanks to MyLogIQ.

Click here to see which CEO made 2,077 times what his workers did.
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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.