Popular Internet search engine Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were offered a raise in their salaries, which they declined to accept saying they would continue taking the token amount of $1 annually.
Eric, Sergey and Larry were offered increase in their salary but they rejected the offers citing own preferences not to receive salary and bonus compensation at this time, a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said.
Schmidt, Page and Brin first reduced their annual salaries to $1 in 2004 when Google filed plans to go public.
Before that Schmidt had been earning an annual salary of $250,000, while Brin and Page received $150,000 a year.
"There is a school of thought that if you have a significant block of company stock that should be sufficiently motivating," Tim Sparks, president of Compensia, an executive compensation consulting firm told the San Jose Mercury News.
Since the company's IPO in August 2004, Schmidt has sold stock worth $549 million, Page has sold nearly $2.2 billion and Brin has sold stock worth more than $1.8 billion.
All three continue to hold significant stakes in the company. Schmidt has 12.4 million shares, while Page and Brin each have more than 31.5 million shares, the Mercury News reported. Together their holdings represent 68.8 per cent of shares.
