Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: I told Amazon Board not to give me any salary as I felt …
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once revealed that he asked the company’s broad not to give him any compensation as he already owned the company and did not needed any more incentive to stay motivated. In an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit in 2024, Bezos said, “I just didn’t feel good about taking more… I just felt how could I possibly need more incentive?”. Bezos received a $80,000 per year during his tenure as the CEO of Amazon. He mentioned that he was proud of his decision and framed it as the typical of owner-operators. In the principle of owner-operators, the founders grow their wealth by increasing the value of their existing equity and not by accumulating more.
A different kind of scoreboard
In the same interview, Bezos also challenged the traditional measures of wealth. Amazon founder suggested that personal net worth is hold lesser meaning as compared to the wealth created by others. “Somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they’ve created for other people,” he said. “Amazon’s market cap is $2.3 trillion today… I’ve created something like $2.1 trillion of wealth for other people.”
Silicon valley’s low-salary club
The no compensation approach of Jeff Bezos places him on the list of other tech leaders who went ahead with symbolic or minimal salaries. Meta CEO mark Zuckerberg followed the same policy of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs when it comes to drawing salary. Since, 2013, Zuckerberg has drawn only $1 annually as salary. Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway also took flat $100,000 salary with no stock-based bonuses for a long time. These choices reflect a broader ethos in Silicon Valley: that leadership is about value creation, not personal enrichment.
