There's an exclusive club in Silicon Valley, privy to only a precious few. Its members: the cream of the executive crop, CEOs of today's tech industry giants, all at the helm of companies with billions in revenues and thousands of employees.

Let's not kid ourselves – the salary isn't really about the money. It's a corporate strategy, a move that speaks directly to shareholders. In some ways, it's a show of faith in your product.But getting behind the velvet rope isn't based on market cap, earnings or shares owned. It's about salary – or lack thereof.

Call it the one-dollar club. Inductees take home $1 per year as a salary, a stand-out number in a field where CEOs and executive boards are flush with cash, and seven- to eight-figure salaries are by no means out of the ordinary.

The member list reads like a veritable who's who of the tech industry; Sergey Brin (Google), Elon Musk (Tesla), Jerry Yang (formerly Yahoo), Meg Whitman (Hewlett-Packard) and of course, the late Steve Jobs (Apple).

And as Facebook recent S-1 filing shows, the club has yet another new inductee: Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO took a $499,999 pay cut from 2011 to 2012, lowering his salary to that of the Valley elite, a difference proving that, to some, money really is no object.

Origins

The roots of the practice spread far beyond the fertile soil of Silicon Valley.

As the U.S. geared up for World War II in the 1930s and '40s, increased military spending put millions of Americans – suffering from the effects of the Great Depression – back to work.

The problem was, the bureaucrats running the government weren't properly equipped to oversee a major mobilization of the American workforce, redistributing huge swaths of labor into new industrialized positions. In order to run things more smoothly, industry moguls of all types across the private sector flew in from all over the country, effectively asked by the federal government to come in and volunteer their time in service of their country.

These men were indispensable. They brought expertise from their respective industries to the table in a time when the country needed help with the division of labor. But volunteerism without proper compensation from the government wasn't legal. So in order to skirt this technicality, they were given salaries for their service. The amount? One U.S. dollar.

These "Dollar-a-Year" men, as they came to be known, brought with them a sense of civic duty combined with capitalistic self-interest, acting in service of the nation while still keeping in mind the best interests of their companies. The "cost-plus-a-fixed-fee system" of development – wherein the government assured full repayment for contractor development resources as well as an additional fee on top – incentivized private enterprise to cooperate. It was democratic ideology at its finest; Business and government, working hand in hand, all in the name of nationalism.

The New Deal

The synergy between today's top tech execs and the original "Dollar-a-Year" men is spot-on. Page's and Zuck's war isn't one between nations, but of clashing companies struggling for market share, mindshare, and engineering talent. Yesteryear's patriotism gives way to a new fealty – not to the state, nor even the user – a responsibility to keeping the company shareholders happy.

So let's not kid ourselves – the salary isn't really about the money. It's a corporate strategy, a move that speaks directly to shareholders. In some ways, it's a show of faith in your product.

"The assumption is that they stand to gain on the stock they own over time," Dr. Charles Diamond, managing economic director at FTI Consulting, told Wired. "It's a signal that they’re betting on the company."

Think back to 1999, when Steve Jobs returned to an ailing Apple, a company being closed in on by the dominant PC consortium led by Microsoft's Windows software. In his return as interim CEO (or iCEO, as he was popularly dubbed), Jobs became a dollar-a-year man, the most famous one of the past three decades. His return was not about the money; he had made his millions years ago. It was about building a company.

Indeed, Zuckerberg signals that he's not only betting on his company, he has little intention of cashing out and running any time soon. In his founder's letter – tucked into the body of the S-1 filing – Zuckerberg speaks of Facebook less as a company than a philosophy, a "social mission" to be propelled. "We often talk about inventions like the printing press," he writes, aspiring to Gutenbergian levels of influence. "By simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society."

Then comes the bombshell: "We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” he writes. “These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”

Do Not Be Fooled

These men speak of far-reaching aspirations with a sense of nobility, a manifest destiny of the internet age. The dollar-a-year salary is supposed to convince us that it isn't about the money.

But almost antithetically, this sort of philosophy is exactly what shareholders want to hear.

Since the death of Steve Jobs, investors are starved for another visionary. Career CEOs who jump from seat to seat in the Valley without any true allegiance to any one company – think of the Scott Thompsons, the Leo Apothekers, even the Meg Whitmans of the tech world – they're less attractive than someone like Jobs, like Zuck, founders that at least seem to have deep, emotional attachments to their companies.

In other words: Making it look like it's never been about the money is the best possible business decision these founders could ever make. Especially in Zuck's case, where his baby is just months away from becoming a publicly traded company.

For men like Larry Page, it's turning into something else. The dollar-a-year salary was important in Google's early years, when the search engine still had something to prove. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos – all were former threats that loomed over the infant Google.

But now Google is expanding beyond search, beyond PageRank, looking for different revenue streams as it experiments in myriad properties, from daily deals to mobile platforms to online retail. Yes, Larry Page is still tied to the company he started, the one he believes in. But Page doesn't need supervision from seasoned Valley execs like Eric Schmidt anymore. Larry Page has grown up.

And as a grown up, he's leveling with his investors. In the most recent Google earnings call, he explicitly reassured shareholders that Google's stock was in good hands. "We’re careful stewards of shareholder money,” he said in January, something we've never heard from Page before.

The Other Bottom Line

On a personal financial level, it's almost smarter for a CEO to go with a buck a year salary.

Under today's tax code, companies take a financial hit for awarding salaries above a million bucks. And what's more, when your salary peaks in the multi-millions, you're stuck in the highest income tax bracket. The trade-off, then, is forgoing millions in annual salaries for billions in vested stock options.

Or take a look at Steve Jobs. In 2001, he still received a $1 salary. But Apple awarded Jobs a "special executive bonus" that year – a $40-million-dollar private jet, on which Apple paid another $40 million in taxes. Not bad.

To be fair, Zuckerberg plans to exercise a large number of options before the IPO. The money he earns will fall under the capital gains tax, sticking him with a bill from the government that could be up to $1.5 billion.

But this also seems like a form of good PR. The tax Zuckerberg pays will be a windfall for the state of California, which has been plagued with an increasing deficit for the last decade.

Belong to the 99 Percent

The public doesn't see the tax benefits behind the scenes.

What we see is the dollar-a-year man, steering the company with no want or need for the fat kinds of salaries we see taken in by the one-percenters on Wall Street. We see the members of the club, men and women on a mission, ready to lead a company to success.

It's the best PR money can buy.