From 1997 until his death, Steve Jobs took home just $1 a year in salary, and most years he collected no bonus. Just $1.
That is, except for 2001, when the company came through with a whopper of an executive bonus: It spent $90 million to buy Jobs a Gulfstream V airplane. Since then, Apple had been reimbursing Jobs' air travel expenses, which totalled $248,000 last year.
Jobs could afford to skip the salary payments: Forbes recently estimated his net worth at $7 billion. Most of that wealth came from the Walt Disney Co., not Apple. Jobs became Disney's largest shareholder in 2006 when Disney bought Pixar.
You don't have to work at Oracle or Apple to be among the top-paid executives in the technology industry, but it helps.
