Looking Back: Apple keeps Jobs’ salary at $1 (plus private airplane)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2002

Looking Back is a regular feature where we go through the news archives and see what happened on this day many years ago. This story is from December 27, 2001.

Apple Computer Inc. paid Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Jobs an annual salary of US$1 for the second straight year, but threw in a “special executive bonus” of an airplane which cost the company a total of $90 million, the company said in its annual report, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday.

Four top executives — Fred Anderson, executive vice president and chief financial officer; Timothy Cook, senior vice president of worldwide operations, sales, service and support; Jonathon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering and Avadis Tevanian Jr., senior vice president of software engineering — were granted options for 1 million Apple shares each. These options had an exercise or base price of $16.81 each on the day they were granted, Apple said.

Cook also received a bonus of $500,000 for “accepting the position of Senior Vice President, Sales, Service and Support, in addition to holding the position of Senior Vice President, Operations,” the company said.

The purchase of Jobs’ airplane in December 1999 cost approximately $43.5 million, Apple said in the report, but the company also paid related taxes of $40.5 million. The plane was originally reported as a bonus in 2000, Apple said, but was moved to the 2001 fiscal year because it was not formally given to Jobs until this year.

Last year, Jobs received options for 20 million Apple shares on top of his $1 salary.