Schmidt has on the order of 10M Google shares or options. Making the stock price go up by $0.01 is worth $100k to him. Spending an hour thinking about salary in

Schmidt has on the order of 10M Google shares or options. Making the stock price go up by $0.01 is worth $100k to him. Spending an hour thinking about salary instead of Google's future is a bad use of his time. If your company has a P/E ratio of N and you have more than 1/Nth of the stock, giving money to the company actually makes you more money. There are subtle ways to do this. For example it probably makes more sense for the founders to buy their own plane for company trips than have Google pay for it, where it reduces reported profit and share price.