When the going gets tough, the tough CEOs join Silicon Valley’s $1 Club.

Taking a $1 salary, or less, has become fashionable among an elite set, which has included everyone from Oracle’s famously rich Larry Ellison to Facebook’s just as rich Mark Zuckerberg to Meg Whitman, one of the world’s richest women.

The trend started in 1997 when Steve Jobs, Apple’s former CEO, returned to the company he co-founded. With his salary at $1, Jobs was able to quickly signal he was focused more on his mission to turn around the firm that today is the world’s most valuable than on himself.

Last year, the $1 Club included Zuckerberg; Larry Page, chief executive of Alphabet, the parent company of Google; Mark Pincus, then Zynga’s chief executive; and Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s top chief, according to the 2015 Equilar Silicon Valley CEO Pay Study conducted for the Bay Area News Group.

Sure, the $1 Club is part publicity stunt. After all, most of these executives are enriched by other means, including valuable equity stakes in their companies and other compensation.

And being a member comes with bragging rights: “Hey, everyone, I don’t need the cash to pay the bills. My financial fate is tied directly to my equity stake in the company.”

But the $1 Club is symbolically important: It’s a way for the current generation of tech leaders to back up their claim that they are different from the corporate barons who came before them.

“It’s part of a mentality of this younger generation to promote social responsibility among the leaders of business, some of whom have pledged to give away their wealth,” said Wendy Moore, a partner at Jones Day, the law firm, where she specializes in executive and equity compensation. “They think, ‘If I’m giving away my money, why do I need to draw a large annual salary?’ ”



That may be true for a small set of executives, like Zuckerberg and Ellison, both of whom have pledged to give away the bulk of their fortunes during their lifetimes.

For others, joining the club is a sign of austerity. It shows employees that the CEO feels the pain when a company struggles — and signals to shareholders that the firm is serious about belt-tightening.

Tom Werner, CEO of SunPower, recently announced he would reduce his salary and cash bonus to $1 for the rest of the year, leaving behind a portion of his $600,000 annual salary. The company also announced layoffs as it cut its revenue forecast.

Then there’s Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity. He was ranked No. 1 among 172 Silicon Valley companies for his 2015 total compensation, according to Equilar, the executive compensation solutions firm. (Equilar calculates its compensation figures using data provided in each company’s proxy statement. Total compensation includes salary, cash bonuses, grant date value of stock and option awards, and other compensation).

What put Rive at the top of the list was a $77 million stock option award. (For those keeping track, yes, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, should have technically been No. 1 since he had a total 2015 package of $100 million, including a salary of $652,500. Because Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet and doesn’t file a separate proxy, he wasn’t included in Equilar’s study).

But Rive didn’t actually get $77 million. He has to earn those options over a period of years by meeting business metrics, an agreement similar to the one Tesla has with CEO Elon Musk, Rive’s cousin.

“My own compensation is based on this principle: If SolarCity does not significantly increase value for shareholders and employees and deliver a better experience for customers, then I do not deserve more than my base salary, and that’s the only pay I will receive,” Rive wrote in a blog post.

But now Rive doesn’t have his $275,016 salary. In August, he announced he too was joining the $1 Club, amid layoffs, in advance of Tesla’s proposed acquisition of SolarCity.

It’s unclear how paying a CEO only $1 fits with labor laws. But experts note that CEOs aren’t complaining to state officials. Under federal law, CEOs don’t have to be paid at all if they own 20-percent equity interest. Zuckerberg, for instance, has a 28 percent stake in the social networking firm he founded, a chunk worth about $24 billion.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is paid $37,584, which Tesla says in a securities filing, reflects minimum wage requirements under California law. The salary is subject to income tax. “Mr. Musk, however, has never accepted and currently does not accept his salary,” the company said in its filing.

That would put Musk in the Zero Dollar Club.

He’s not alone there. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, “requested that he forego all compensation for 2015,” according to a company filing. Dorsey, who also gave up $200 million of his own Twitter shares, may be a rare member of the Less Than Zero Club. (The company did spend $68,506 on Dorsey’s security, the sum total of his 2015 compensation).

Membership in the $1 Club is a revolving door, with CEOs joining and leaving typically depending on the health of their companies.

When she took the CEO role at Hewlett Packard in 2011, Meg Whitman accepted a $1 annual salary. Now Whitman’s total package at HP is $17 million, including a $1.5 million salary. She ranks 16th in overall Silicon Valley compensation in the 2015 study.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison — who now ranks 7th on Forbes‘ richest list — also took a $1 salary for several years when he was CEO, even though his total compensation easily topped annual lists.

When the going got tough for Zynga in 2013, former CEO and founder, Mark Pincus, dropped his salary to $1 to signal he was serious about improving the firm’s stock price. The stock still fell.

Of course, taking home a big salary is not really what the tech industry is about. It’s all about equity, which offers the greatest risk and the greatest reward.

“In these kinds of companies that are risky, the CEO wants a piece of the action,” said David Larcker, an accounting professor at Stanford.

Generally, the bigger salaries and compensation packages in Silicon Valley are found at older, mature companies. Oracle’s co-CEOs, Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, are paid $950,000 each and are ranked 3rd and 4th for their total compensation. Marc Benioff of Salesforce is paid a $1.5 million salary and is ranked 6th for his compensation. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, saw a $2 million salary, high for a tech CEO, but his total compensation was $10 million, ranking him 36th.

So who made the most in salary in the Bay Area in 2015?

A banker, of course.

John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, earned the top salary of $2.8 million among the 172 executives in the Equilar survey. But of course, Wells Fargo is hardly a tech company. Although Stumpf’s salary was larger than anyone else’s in the Equilar study, his total compensation of $19 million landed him in the number 10 spot.

When Stumpf testified in the U.S. Senate last week about the bogus accounts scandal at his bank, Sen. Elizabeth Warren told him he should resign, accusing him of “gutless leadership.”

It may be time for Stumpf to join the $1 Club.