This is a non-story. It might be a slightly interesting point that the top Google executives don't take out salary, but stories like these are never anything but PR stunts. Anyone with half a chimpanzee's brain understands that these numbers don't mean anything. All 3 of them could take a salary of 500 million dollars, and the shareholders would hardly notice. I suppose the goal with stunts like these is to show solidarity with the workers who earn much less, but this rings hollow when each of them has enough stock to buy the family of every employee. I'm not saying it's a problem that these guys have great fortunes, but it seems a bit cowardly for them to pretend that they are actually quite frugal. They are not, by a long shot.
The only thing worth noting is that they only use their own shares for large expenses. But the practical implications of this are miniscule. And in the case of the CEO, these shares were after all issued at a time.
The top execs taking no salary is definitely a signal, but it's not solidarity with the other employees. Taking your pay all in equity means you're pegging your future wealth entirely on the performance of the company. Having executives aligned so heavily on real-world success (as opposed to just maximizing their yearly bonus) is pretty much all a stockholder--employees included--can ask for.
> I'm not saying it's a problem that these guys have great fortunes, but it seems a bit cowardly for them to pretend that they are actually quite frugal.
I don't know where you got the idea that they are "pretending to be frugal", or how that is somehow cowardly. They just take most of their compensation in the form of stock options/grants. Big deal.
The only thing worth noting is that they only use their own shares for large expenses. But the practical implications of this are miniscule. And in the case of the CEO, these shares were after all issued at a time.