In corporate America, few status symbols rival the one-figure salary.

As companies file their annual reports disclosing how much they pay their head honchos – and inevitably ignite outrage about exorbitant executive salaries – consider Google.

Every two weeks, the three billionaires who run the Internet search giant get a paycheck for about 4 cents. Before taxes.

Googlers Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt are part of an exclusive club of top executives who drew $1 annual salaries last year. No bonuses. No stock-option grants. Other members include the co-founder of energy company Kinder Morgan, Richard Kinder; the chief executive of Apple, Steve Jobs; the CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and his company’s chairman, Roger Enrico.

Of course, these executives – most of them company founders – have something else in common: They’re already filthy rich, thanks to ownership stakes in the companies they helped build.

In World War II, when the dollar-a-year salary gained currency, it communicated the importance of personal sacrifice in wartime. Now, the dollar sends a different message: The buck stops here. Because many of today’s corporate leaders own so much of the companies they run, their personal fortunes are tied to corporate success. They succeed when the company does.

“It’s a gesture to the shareholders saying ‘I’ve got more money than I could spend in 52 lifetimes – just pay me a dollar and I’m happy enough,'” an executive compensation specialist, Graef Crystal, said.

Messrs. Brin and Page have cashed in $2.2 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, in company stock since taking the company public in 2004, and Mr. Schmidt, the CEO, has pulled in $645 million, according to Thomson Financial. The founders each hold nearly $13 billion in stock, and Mr. Schmidt’s shares are worth about $5 billion.

Mr. Jobs’s current Apple shares are worth $670 million. Mr. Kinder is due to pull in $84 million this year in dividends from his Kinder Morgan stock.

A. Jerrold Perenchio, chairman and CEO of Univision Communications, passed on the buck. He draws no salary at all, but his ownership stake in the Los Angeles-based Spanish-language media company is worth nearly $1.3 billion.

“They’re not working for free,” a Silicon Valley executive compensation lawyer, Tom LaWer, said. “Saying it’s a dollar salary doesn’t really get to the fact that they’re all fabulously wealthy.”

In 2005, the median CEO salary of big public companies surveyed by Mercer Human Resource Consulting was $975,000. With an additional $1.4 million in bonuses, the median CEO compensation (not including grants of restricted stock or stock options) rose 7.1% over the previous year – double the raise of the average employee.

Mayor Bloomberg also works for a dollar but doesn’t cash the paychecks. One hangs in his ceremonial office on the first floor of City Hall. He has joked that at the end of his eight years in office, he hopes to have the city budget off by $8 – a dollar for each check he didn’t cash.

The practice can be worth a fortune in good publicity.

“Once one person did it, it just sounded good,” Mr. LaWer, said.

In the corporate world, the single digit salary has largely been adopted by CEOs trying to restore shareholder confidence in their struggling companies, such as Lee Iacocca at Chrysler in the late 1970s.

When Silicon Valley companies withered during the dot-com bust, the practice flourished as executives tried to send shareholders a we’re-in-it-together message. The gesture was often undercut by corporate boards granting those CEOs hefty awards of stock options that could be sold with only a mild stockmarket recovery. Buck-a-year chiefs who reaped stock-option windfalls include John Chambers of Cisco Systems and Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems.

Larry Ellison of Oracle gave up his salary for 2001 through 2003, when the company’s stock was struggling, but he cashed in $706 million in stock options in 2001 and $41 million in 2003.

Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Enrico each get a $1 salary at DreamWorks. While he was CEO of PepsiCo., Mr. Enrico collected bonuses and stock options, but regularly donated all but a buck of his million-dollar salary to a college scholarship fund for Pepsi employees.

At the other company he runs, Pixar, Mr. Jobs earns a dollar a week: $52 for each of the last two years. As of February 15, he owned 49.8% of the company, which Walt Disney Company is buying for $7.4 billion, meaning Mr. Jobs’s stake will be $3.7 billion.

Mr. Jobs has taken a $1 salary at Apple since 1998, not long after he rejoined the company he co-founded, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for lowest paid chief executive. But Apple paid him in plenty of other ways, including multimillion-dollar stock grants and bonuses, as well as a corporate jet in 1999 that cost the company $90 million. Still, compensation experts say, it’s certainly better than CEOs who pull in high salaries and extraordinary pay packages, even as their companies struggle. According to the Corporate Library, the CEO of Home Depot, Robert Nardelli, earned $50.7 million over the last two years, although his company’s stock fell 19% over the last five years. Lucent Technologies has seen its shares plunge 82% during that period, but CEO Patricia Russo pulled in $17.3 million during the last two years.