Schmidt has on the order of 10M Google shares or options. Making the stock price go up by $0.01 is worth $100k to him. Spending an hour thinking about salary instead of Google's future is a bad use of his time.
If your company has a P/E ratio of N and you have more than 1/Nth of the stock, giving money to the company actually makes you more money. There are subtle ways to do this. For example it probably makes more sense for the founders to buy their own plane for company trips than have Google pay for it, where it reduces reported profit and share price.
This part confused me, "Directors also received what Apple describes as a "commemorative gift" for their service, said to be worth $7,580, plus a payment to cover the tax liability for accepting the gift, which in Schmidt's case was $14,631."
How can you have a tax liability that is 200% of an items value?
I assume the author realizes how little $20k is when you have a real income stream? For somebody in Schmidt's position, it's like taking a free coffee for being on the board of Starbucks.
If your company has a P/E ratio of N and you have more than 1/Nth of the stock, giving money to the company actually makes you more money. There are subtle ways to do this. For example it probably makes more sense for the founders to buy their own plane for company trips than have Google pay for it, where it reduces reported profit and share price.