In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many executives began accepting one-dollar salaries—often in the case of struggling companies or startups—with the potential for further indirect earnings as the result of stock ownership.
U.S. law generally forbids the government from accepting the services of unpaid volunteers,[5] but specific authorities exist within some agencies.
[12] During World War I, the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense was staffed largely by dollar-a-year men, including Bernard Baruch, Robert S. Brookings, and Herbert Bayard Swope.
[citation needed] Kentucky's Ashland Oil and Refining Company founder and CEO, Paul G. Blazer (1890–1966), served twice as a government salaried dollar-a-year man: from 1933 to 1935 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration on the Code of Fair Competition for the Petroleum Industry[14] as Chairman of the Blazer Committee[15] and a second time during World War II as Chairman of District II Refining for Roosevelt's Petroleum Administration of War.
[16][17] Herman Wouk worked in Washington, D.C., as a dollar-a-year man writing radio scripts for the U.S. Treasury's Defense Bond Campaign beginning in June 1941.
[20] An example was John Wilson McConnell, the owner and publisher of the Montreal Star, who was appointed Director of Licences for the Wartime Trade Board, a position for which he served for free.
For example, in 2010–11 Oracle's founder and CEO Larry Ellison made only $1 in salary, but earned over $77 million in other forms of compensation.