Believe it or not, Mark Zuckerberg is Meta’s lowest-paid employee according to legal documents. A claim like this sounds as believable as your crazy uncle’s bigfoot encounter story. However, it is true. In 2023, Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary from the tech super giant was a singular dollar. That’s right, Zuckerberg made one whole dollar last year, on paper of course.
Although Zuckerberg has a very low salary, the CEO brought home a whopping $24.4 million in what was classified as “other compensation”, according to a proxy filing statement released before the annual shareholders meeting in May of 2023.
Despite paying their founder and CEO only “$1.00” per year, they seem to treat all of their other employees very well. The median worker for Meta takes home $379,000. According to Indeed.com, a tech employee can make anywhere from $35,000 to $120,000 per year, much less than the majority of Meta employees.
Zuckerberg’s true profound wealth is generated from multiple sources such as the CEO’s pre-tax allowance, which increased by 40% in 2018, earning Zuckerberg $14 million. Thanks to extremely good fourth-quarter results for Meta this past year, the Facebook CEO’s net worth skyrocketed by $28 billion in just one single day. Much of Zuckerberg’s wealth is attributed to his stake in the company, in which Meta’s recent turnaround success has helped earn Zuckerberg a spot as the third richest person in the world, pushing Elon Musk into fourth place. As of April 2024, Zuckerberg’s net worth has inflated by $100 billion since the previous year.
Even though Meta has seen great profit-margin success recently, that doesn’t mean the company hasn’t faced financial adversaries in the past. In November of 2022, Meta seemed to be in cost-cutting mode, as the company laid off more than 11,000 employees, which equaled up to 13% of its workforce. Doing so has decreased expenses by 8% each year following.
