You would expect the CEOs who head up some of the world's biggest and most successful companies to have some of the highest salaries on the planet. Yet their monthly salary is often tiny. But they make up for that with a wealth (pun intended) of other financial incentives, as we reveal.

The CEO of review platform Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman has seen his salary shrink. In 2012, he was paid $300,000 (£233.6k). That figure dropped to $37,501 (£29k) the following year. In 2014 it went down to zero.

That's not the whole story of course as the Yelp head honcho is entitled to lucrative stock options. In 2016 alone, Stoppelman, who is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was offered a total of $3.7 million (£2.9m) in options.

It isn't just tech industry bigwigs who have plumped for a miniscule or non-existent salary. Richard Fairbank, the co-founder and CEO of commercial bank Capital One, has received no salary or bonuses for the past 22 years.

Instead, the finance entrepreneur has taken his compensation in the form of stock options and rewards, and hasn't done too badly at all out of the no-wage remuneration deal. Fairbank's wealth was estimated by Bloomberg at around $1.1 billion (£856m) in January 2018 on the back of the increasing Capital One share price.

Larry Page, Google co-founder and CEO of Alphabet, takes home a salary of just $1 (77p). Page follows in the footsteps of another Silicon Valley billionaire, the late Steve Jobs, who set the trend when he rejoined Apple in 1997.

Likewise, Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergei Brin has been paid $1 (77p) a year since the search engine went public in 2004, as has Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, though they've all cleaned up via performance-related stock rewards.

Another member of the $1 salary club, Mark Zuckerberg took a gigantic pay cut in 2013 when his yearly salary went from $770,000 (£599.5k) to a single dollar. But don't feel sorry for him just yet. The social media boss raked in $23 billion (£17.9bn) in 2017 thanks to Facebook's rising share price.

CEOs opt for this sort of drastic pay cut for a number of reasons, one of which is to appease shareholders who may frown on excessively high salaries but don't seem to mind senior execs receiving lavish performance-based share options. Zuckerberg's net worth is currently estimated at $59.5 billion (£45.3bn), according to Bloomberg.

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Amid falling revenues, employee layoffs and a plummeting share price, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman has done the decent thing and slashed his salary to $1 (77p), presumably to show solidarity with his workforce and quell the ire of the shareholders.

The salary drop is quite a comedown for Woodman, but at least it hasn't stopped him smiling. The adventure camera company boss was actually America's highest-paid CEO in 2014, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index, taking home a grand total of $287.2 million (£223.6m) that year.

Richard Hayne, the boss of hip fashion chain Urban Outfitters, has drawn a $1 salary since 2010. Hayne does, however, receive a variety of benefits including performance-related rewards, and car and life insurance. This sees Hayne make 4.67 times the retailer's median pay rate.

On top of the performance-related bonuses and insurance premiums, Hayne holds the majority of the company stock, and with the Urban Outfitters share price surging, Hayne is cashing in. His net worth in January 2019 stands at $1.2 billion (£934m), according to Forbes.

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum agreed to a $1 (77p) salary when he joined Facebook back in October 2014, following its $19 billion (£14.8bn) acquisition of the popular instant messaging service.

Koum plumped instead for stock options. The Ukrainian-born tech magnate has already sold around $7.1 billion (£5.5bn)-worth of Facebook shares, and while he announced that he planned to leave Facebook in April 2018 he was still employed by the company in August, CNBC reported, in order to receive his $450 million (£350.4m) in remaining stock.

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Staying with tech billionaires, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel saw his salary drop to nothing following his company's IPO in June 2017. The fresh-faced chief exec had been drawing a salary of $503,205 (£391,800) in 2016.

Spiegel's remuneration package is largely based on stock options and rewards, so his move may not have been quite as shrewd as he hoped given Snap's struggling share price, which has trended downwards since the IPO. That said, in 2017 Spiegel received $638 million (£496.7m), which is a higher payout than any other US CEO, a remarkable fact as Snap actually lost $720 million (£560.6m) that year. Forbes estimates his current net worth at $1.6 billion (£1.2bn).

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In October 2007, Whole Foods Market's CEO John Mackey penned a letter to his employees in which he pledged to reduce his salary to a mere dollar and donate all future stock options to the company's two foundations.

True to his word, Mackey has worked pretty much for free for the past 10 or so years. However, the Whole Foods Market boss won't be going broke anytime soon. He still has one million shares in the company, and his net worth is variously reported as between $76 million (£59m) and $100 million (£78m).

Kinder Morgan president and CEO Steve Kean has taken his cues from company co-founder and chairman Richard Kinder, who declines to take a meaningful wage, and is paid a salary of not more than a dollar.

Kean also forgoes an annual bonus, stock options and other CEO staples, but records show the energy infrastructure exec earned a total of $377,360 (£293.8k) in 2017 in the form of other types of compensation.

Since 2013, Sears CEO Edward Lampert has earned a $1 salary with zero bonuses, but he is not struggling to make ends meet. Despite his ailing firm's poor stock market performance over the past few years, and 400 store closures in 2017, 188 in 2018, and another 40 planned for February 2019, Lampert has made a fortune.

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The retail boss, who is remunerated with stock, received just over $4.3 million (£3.4m) in Sears shares for the 2017 fiscal year, an increase of about $850,000 (£661.8k) on the previous year. And Lampert, who owns 54% of Sears' outstanding stock, currently has a net worth of $1 billion (£778.6m), according to Forbes.

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also heads credit card processing company Square, and takes home a combined salary of next to nothing for both roles. Dorsey receives zero salary at Twitter, but the firm covers his security, which costs around $70,000 (£54.5k) a year.

Dorsey's salary at Square amounts to a symbolic $2.75 (£2.14), the maximum percentage the company charges merchants per transaction, down from the heady heights of $6,000 (£4.7k) per annum in 2016. Yet Forbes estimated that he made $8 million (£6.1m) by selling Square stock in 2018 and says his net worth is $4.7 billion (£3.6bn).

Musk's current salary stands at around $37,000 (£28.8k) to adhere to Californian minimum wage regulations, but the superstar CEO famously refuses it. "I don't cash it in. It just ends up accumulating in a Tesla bank account somewhere," Musk told The Times. His real earnings are tied to Tesla's performance – the tech tycoon makes money by hitting a number of challenging financial targets.

If Tesla achieves 12 massively ambitious “Market Capitalization Milestones” and Tesla surges in value to over $650 billion (£506bn) within the decade, the world's most innovative billionaire will be awarded a cool $55.8 billion (£43.4bn) in stock options.

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