How hard it is to live on $1/year clearly depends on how much money you have in the bank, or other resources you might have. In absence of that (or if your net

How hard it is to live on $1/year clearly depends on how much money you have in the bank, or other resources you might have. In absence of that (or if your net worth is actually negative--say, you have a lot of student loans), then it's just not possible to work without a salary. You could do some consulting on the side, I suppose, but that would defeat the point of having employees. And as an employee, you're probably better off finding a job somewhere else than working at a company where the CEO has to spend part of his time working on something else just to get by.