Billionaires "paid $1 a year"

THREE SOFTWARE BILLIONAIRES are to pay themselves just $1 in salary this year. The men in question operate an effective monopoly on a major segment of the Internet and are worth an estimated $19 billion.

Nothing weird about the super-rich paying themselves peanuts to keep the old tax bill down while living off dividends and stock in their company, you might think, but why isn't anyone criticising them for using a cynical ploy to reduce personal tax while having more money than you can shake a stick at?

The answer, of course, is that these billionaires wear white hats and work for a company whose motto is 'don't be evil'. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have limited their salaries to a $1 for the third consecutive year while the company they run has seen its value rise to five times its original listed worth in 2004.

It is a damning indictment of technology watchers and journalists worldwide that these men - all of whom it could be justly be said are obscenely rich - receive no approbation while other obscenely rich persons (most of whom work for Microsoft) are perceived as widely-deserving of being hung from a lamp post.

Ignoring the huge charitable contributions (more than the UK Government donates) made by Bill Gates to helping the Third World, why is he regularly depicted as the Antichrist, while Google's merry billionaires are seen as jolly good chaps? Is it because having a Trillion dollars automatically makes someone nastier than a mere Billionaire or is it just because people earning £15,000 a year are simply jealous?

I would suggest that the latter is more likely the case.

And if we're into disliking people on monetary grounds, might I suggest a more deserving target would be a Ms Beverley Charman, the woman at present maintaining in the High Court that she is entitled to £48 million of her ex-husband's £130 million fortune rather than the piffling £20 million he's offered her in addition to the £68 million he's used to establish a trust fund for their children. Not a bad return for a woman whose main contribution appears to be that she's slept with him for a few years. Now let's see, what's the term for someone who does that?

Nobody needs £20 million to live on, let alone £48 million. Ms Charman would do well to remember a passage from David Copperfield (the novel, not the magician): "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."

Go on, admit it - no matter how much money you make, there's always going to be someone out there with more than you, but that doesn't automatically make them bad people. The ability to behave like a git doesn't depend on the thickness of your wallet.

And operating what could best be described as a low-cost model lifestyle myself, I am constantly reminded that while money can't buy you happiness, it can at least buy you beer. µ