The First Post is reporting that Facebook has the right to terminate Zuckerberg under any reason they see fit, including no reason at all. His tenure at Facebook is on an “at will” basis which means that he could be fired at any time.

His employment agreement was exposed last month when Facebook filed their massive IPO.

While everything about Zuckerberg’s employment including benefits and personnel policy can be changed whenever they want, the “at will” employment termination can only be changed after a written agreement approved by the Facebook board.

The “at will” clause also applies to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. She does, however, have a clause in her agreement that has Facebook reimbursing her for all business expenses. Zuckerberg does not have that clause in his agreement.

In another interesting clause, Zuckerberg is not allowed to help start up a service that would compete with Facebook during his time with the company. The same clause applies to COO Sheryl Sandberg, CFO David Ebersman and VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer.

Interestingly enough, none of the agreements mention whether or not these people could start a competitor if they were to leave the company.

Zuckerberg is starting out with a base salary of $500,000 so it doesn’t seem that he’ll be leaving the company of his own free will any time soon. Sandberg and Ebersman will have an annual salary of $300,000 each while Schroepfer’s annual salary is set at $275,000. All of them are entitled to an end-year bonus equal to 45 percent or less of their annual salary.

I will say that I don’t like when it leads to Google serving me less relevant results (which I think is happening more as a result of other algorithm tweaks as well). I searched for “mark zuckerberg” and Google returned me his Google+ profile as the very top result. Not his Facebook profile. His Google+ profile.

Any guesses as to how many Google+ updates Zuckerberg has shared publicly? Zero.

Any guesses as to how many Google+ updates Zuckerberg has shared with me personally? Same answer.

So how is Zuck’s Google+ profile supposed to help me as a user for such a general query? I don’t know. Perhaps Google is delivering this result because I do have Zuckerberg in a circle (in case he ever does make an update). I’m not sure, because when I try to test this by taking him out of the circle, Google doesn’t accept the removal. A bug I guess. Either way, if it’s because of the “personal connection” between Mark and myself, does that mean Google’s algorithm isn’t sophisticated enough to realize that there is virtually no content on Zuckerberg’s profile? Isn’t that against the rules of search quality, which Google has driven into the ground since the unleashing of the Panda update in 2011?

Of course it’s sophisticated enough.

Isn’t it also sophisticated enough to see that Mark and I have never actually exchanged a piece of information with one another via Google+?

Probably.

I don’t want to get into all of the talk about Google’s competitive practices here, because that’s not the part that bothers me as a user. It’s the whole making the results less usable thing.

As a Google user, I want integration among the various Google services I use. However, sometimes Search Plus Your World benefits the results, and sometimes it does not.

Zuckerberg is certainly not the only exec to do this. In the wake of the Wall Street financial crisis, the salaries of CEOs have come under public scrutiny, particularly those whose customers lost lots of money. So, some companies have made hay out of the fact that their CEO takes a relatively modest salary.

But, a $1 CEO is a different breed. Why would Zuckerberg do it? No one lost any money due to Facebook’s market maneuvers or unregulated activities. Overall approval of Facebook in general is high. Public opinion of Zuckerberg is good, especially after the movie “The Social Network“. Zuckerberg is a capitalist hero, a geek wunderkind, the model of everything both the left and right love in America. Who would blame him for taking his company public, then raking in billions off something that not one user has to pay for?

What about other $1 execs? Others who have been listed as having single-digit salaries include Apple’s Steve Jobs, Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, HP’s Meg Whitman, and the Google triumvirate of Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

The public perception of these salaries is, and is intended to be, that these execs are sacrificing for the sake of the company or municipality they are overseeing. And, it is not to say that altruistic intentions are not involved, especially in the case of execs at the helm of a company they started.

In the case of elected officials like Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg, the low salary reflects a commitment to turn around a bad situation they were elected to fix. It endears them to voters and constituents. The rewards in terms of public goodwill are great.

The actions of these men hearken back to a time when America was clawing its way out of a bad spot. Around World War I, many business executives came to serve in branches of the U.S. government where they had business expertise. These execs took only a single dollar in salary and were called One-Dollar Men.

Lee Iacocca was brought in to turn around a failing Chrysler Corporation in 1978. Iacocca had been run out of Ford Motor Company after overseeing the public fiasco that was the Ford Pinto. His reputation was on the rocks due to his “safety doesn’t sell” statements about the fire-hazard pinto. But, Chrysler recognized that Iacocca was, under all the public hype, still an excellent top man.

Iacocca took a $1 annual salary from Chrysler, which drew attention to his efforts as a rescuer of the company, a core part of America’s auto industry. It also helped rehabilitate Iacocca’s public image.

The public image advantages to taking a low salary are easy to see, whether in a failing-company scenario or in the case of a government leader working to turn around a state.

But, are there actually financial advantages to an exec who takes a very low salary to run a successful company? There certainly could be.

1) Lower Taxes. This one is simple. Payroll taxes are higher than taxes on capital gains in the United States. This fact has led to many political arguments in the past couple of years, and has become much more common knowledge as a result.

Mark Zuckerberg’s current outright salary is $600,000 per year. In terms of payroll tax, he is in a 35% tax bracket. If, however, he reduces his salary to $1 and takes stock options instead – a great deal for a company with an IPO like Facebook – he deals with capital gains tax, which is currently at 15%. Zuckerberg currently holds 28.2% of the company.

This makes sense, but let’s get a little crazy with the possibilities here.

2) No Taxes. Imagine this one, as proposed in a CNBC story. If Zuckerberg were to forego and future bonuses or additional stock rewards, and not cash out any stock (resulting in capital gains), he would effectively have an income of $1 a year, all while building a fortune as his stock rises, splits, etc. He has accrued enough money to live comfortably, though not extravagantly, for a while. To have no tax burden at all, continually plowing your resources back in on themselves, will build an even bigger legacy.

3) Living On Debt. Even once Zuckerberg’s savings runs out, he could live off a Home Equity Line of Credit. CNBC explains that scenario:

People sometimes talk about the rich “living off the interest” of their wealth. But that’s not really a tax efficient way to live if you are really, really wealthy. It’s better to live off of debt and muni bonds.

The best thing for Zuckerberg would be a home equity line of credit—perhaps multiple home equity lines. He would borrow against the value of real estate he owns. The money he receives from the HELOC is debt rather than income, which means it isn’t taxed. Even better, the interest he pays on the HELOC can be used to offset other income he may earn.

4) Taxpayer Money. This one is highly unlikely, but it is possible. If Mark Zuckerberg shows an income between $1 and $13,650 (2011 tables), he could qualify for Earned Income Tax Credit, even without children. Sounds silly, but there it is. with up to three children, he could collect up to $5,751 dollars in EIC per year, as well as Medicaid and Food Stamp benefits.

Now, this is not to say that Mark Zuckerberg intends to do any of these things, except maybe #1. But, once you have made your bones in business at the level of a Zuckerberg, the possibilities change. The planning can change. You don’t worry about things that many “normal” people worry about. You don’t care when W-2s arrive. You don’t concern yourself with bounced check fees. And, you don’t plan your tax strategy with “normal people” considerations like home mortgage interest, charitable contributions and job hunting expenses. These things are used, but they are not the core of your strategy.

Adding zeroes to the end of some of your numbers allows you to reduce the number most “normal people” worry about to a single dollar, and still build a kingdom.

And, you can give it away.

On December 9, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett signed a “Giving Pledge” in which they promised to donate at least half their wealth over the course of time to charity. These men are all listed in the Top Twenty of Forbe’s World’s Most Powerful People (Gates is #5, Zuckerberg # 9, Buffett #20). They could do a lot in the world with the combination of wealth and influence they hold. Gates, for example, has long taken on the eradication of malaria from the Earth as his personal mission. And, in the past 10 years, incidence of malaria in the world has gone down 20%.

As big ticket financial advisers would say, “The more you keep, the more you can give away.”

Marianne Oleson has been charged with 33 felony charges in the Winnebago County Court. The prosecutors say the woman claimed to own shares of Facebook stock and swindled at least 4 people in to buying the fake stock. One complaint states that one man gave Oleson 28,000 dollars in cash money in exchange for “legitimate looking” documents.

Officials say Oleson acquired the documents from a Florida company that owns private stock of the social network giant by telling the company she was interested in buying 1 million dollars worth of shares.

Oleson has many aliases including the last names of Jansen, Milock and Maloney. Randy Stafford, the aforementioned man that was swindled says he was indeed “swindled”. Stafford performed construction on Oleson’s home and after she couldn’t afford to pay him, she offered him the stock in exchange; Stafford said:

“I think it’s a great opportunity, it’s a growing business so on and so forth.”

Reportedly, 18,00 dollars was in payment for work he did on the home and stafford payed an additional 10,000 dollars for the stocks themselves. Stafford went on to say:

“I’m interested in my options and investments so you don’t have to work as hard and make it a lot easier money for my kids and family.”

Stafford went on to say that “something didn’t feel right”; seems his instincts were correct; according to the victim, Oleson had bought up to 1 million dollars worth of the faux stock.

Police officials say that stafford wasn’t the only one duped. Jeff Bellin of the Winnebago County Sheriff’s office says:

“There were other victims initially identified and from there, it just grew.”

A criminal complaint lists 5 victims including Stafford that purchased or had the fake stock given to them as a gift. Bellin feels that there may be more victims out there too. To add insult to injury, Oleson is facing marijuana possession charges on top of her previous charges.

Contained in said filings are some interesting bits of information about the company, not the least of which the salary information of Facebook’s top executives. And CEO Mark Zuckerbergs’s total compensation may surprise you. All in all, Zuckerberg raked in $1,487,362 – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Facebook said that their compensation committee looked at the base salaries for their execs and adjusted them during Q1 of 2011. “The compensation committee decided to increase the base salaries of our executive officers in order to continue to bring their salaries closer to those paid by our Peer Group companies for similar positions,” said the filing.

With that in mind, they raised Zuckerberg’s salary by $100,000 and all other top execs by $25,000. They make a point to mention that these salaries are still under the 25th percentile of salaries of peer companies. Having said that, the Facebook group didn’t do too bad for themselves. In base salary alone, Facebook’s top five execs made between $275,000 and $500,000.

Zuckerberg

Facebook’s CEO made $1,487,362 in total compensation in 2011. This includes $483,333 in base salary, plus a $220,500 bonus. The rest of it comes in “other compensation” – to the tune of $783,529. What’s that mean? The filing says it’s “$692,679 for costs related to personal use of aircraft chartered in connection with his comprehensive security program and on which family and friends flew during 2011, and $90,850 for costs related to estate and financial planning during 2011.

That near $500,000 salary isn’t going to be there for long, however. Zuckerberg will begin taking a $1 salary effective 2013. This is not an unprecedented moved for top tech CEOs – Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page are notable chiefs who also take only a buck in salary each year.

Mr. Zuckerberg will be fine, we predict. He does, after all, have a 28% stake in a company worth upwards of $100 billion.

Here’s the rest of the financial info for the execs. From the top: CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, CFO David Ebersman, VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, and VP General Counsel and Secretary Theodore Ullyot.

Facebook moved into its new home at Menlo Park last month. The campus consists of 10 buildings. There are 2,000 employees in the East Campus, with a vacant lot next door for “further developments”. The company says it is hoping to accommodate a lot more in the years to come.

Speaking of Facebook walls, the company announced today that it will begin pushing the new Timeline feature to all users over the next few weeks. It’s been available for a while, but now users will no longer have a choice if they don’t like it.

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Zuckerberg even tweeted the message (his first tweet since March ’09):

No Google+ updates though, despite 624,988 people having him in their circles. He only has 118,854 Twitter followers.

On the company’s Washington D.C. page, Facebook says:

At Facebook, we take online piracy and copyright infringement very seriously. Rogue foreign sites that pirate American intellectual property or sell counterfeit goods pose significant problems for our economy. However, we believe the PROTECT IP Act (or PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which are currently being considered by Congress, are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage these overreaching bills would cause to the Internet.

On the same page, under “our position,” Facebook says:

PROTECT IP and SOPA could create very real problems for Internet companies like ours that are a primary driver of innovation, growth, and job creation in the 21st century economy. The bills contain overly broad definitions and create a new private cause of action against companies on the basis of those expansive definitions, which could seriously hamper the innovation, growth, and investment in new companies that have been the hallmarks of the Internet. In addition, we are concerned about provisions in the bills that could chill free expression or weaken the Internet’s architecture.

Facebook says it has been engaging in a “constructive dialogue” on fighting piracy, and points out that it makes it a priority to respond promptly, when it is made aware of illegal content.

Facebook points to this NetCoalition petition to “share your thoughts” with Congress.

The Buffalo News is reporting that Paul Ceglia has been ordered by a judge to pay a $5,000 as he has been found in contempt. U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio ruled that Ceglia had to pay the fee and part of Facebook’s attorney fees and expenses because he didn’t provide Facebook information about his personal email accounts.

“The circumstances under which [Ceglia] attempted to avoid complying establishes a plain lack of respect for the court’s order which cannot be countenanced,” Foschio said in his ruling.

The court order was issued in August and it makes me wonder why Ceglia wasn’t held in contempt sooner for obstructing the long, drawn out case of the man who claims to own half of the company.

Ceglia’s lawyers, who have dropped the case, documented his refusal to comply with the simple court order. In the document, the lawyers said they did everything they could to get Ceglia to comply with the order.

“For whatever reasons, [Ceglia], fully advised by his attorneys not to do so, chose to knowingly ignore the unambiguous orders of the court,” Foschio said in his ruling.

As part of the ruling, the judge also rejected Ceglia’s request for sanctions against Facebook.

Ceglia only agreed to turn over the email account information after he was ordered to by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Arcara.

The legal fight between Facebook and Ceglia has been going on for a few years now. Hopefully the case will be resolved when Facebook motions to have the suit dismissed soon.

ZDNet describes how it worked:

Users are able to report “inappropriate profile photos” on a user’s profile. By checking the box ”nudity or pornography,” the user is granted an opportunity to help Facebook “take action by selecting additional photos to include with your report.” Facebook will then display a number of additional photos that are not otherwise publicly available to the user. … This flaw appears to expose private photos of any person on Facebook. We tried this out for ourselves: Sometimes, private photos were exposed; others times they weren’t.

It’s frighteningly easy, but it does require you to report someone for “nudity and pornography.” The folks at ZDNet demonstrated the flaw by accessing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s account and viewing his personal photos (spoiler alert: it worked). They go on to detail some more of the limitations or uncertainties in exploiting this flaw but at this point it’s all moot because the flaw in the Report/Block option appears to be fixed. Facebook issued the following statement to CNET regarding the bug:

Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously.

The bug, was a result of one of our most recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Not all content was accessible, rather a small number of one’s photos. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.

I can confirm Facebook’s solution because I tried to duplicate ZDNet’s softcore hack on Zuckerberg’s account and it didn’t work so if you’re reading this Mr. Zuckerberg, I apologize for reporting you for “nudity or pornography” and hope you will understand the action was taken only under the cause of investigative journalism.

Unsure if this was a Facebook-wide fix or if Zuckerberg got priority and the rest of us would be tended to later, I attempted to access the photos behind the privacy setting of a couple of my Facebook friends but, alas, it was a fruitless endeavor. As far as I can tell, while in the process of a report, a user would reach this window in the second step:

However, contrary to ZDNet’s instruction on how to access the private photos, the option to assist Facebook and “take action by selecting additional photos to include with your report” is no longer an option. You just simply submit the report and the window closes. So, as with Mark Zuckerburg, I apologize to any of my friends who might get some Facebook admin heat because I reported you in an attempt to see if this bug was fixed.

In the area of Mark Zuckerberg talking about Google+, we haven’t really had a lot of work with. A couple of weeks ago, Zuckerberg told Charlie Rose that Google was building “it’s own little Facebook.” Google’s Bradley Horowitz later fired back that they were “delighted to be underestimated.” Hardcore, right? This type of intense combat can only happen in the high-stakes world of social media.

Now, we get another soundbite from Zuckerberg on Google+. This one comes from a BBC profile that aired on Sunday, where Facebook’s CEO was asked if he sees Google+ as a threat. Here’s the response:

Yeah Google’s a great company and I think we want to look at and learn from everything that they do. But at the same time, people have shared a lot on Facebook and have already told a lot of their life story on Facebook. And we think that we have by far better tools for doing that.

In that short answer, Zuckerberg outlines the main reason why Google+ would fight an almost impossibly uphill battle in directly challenging Facebook on pure, standalone social grounds: Facebook is just too engrained in everything that people do online. It’s been on the block for so long that it’s nearly impossible for people to disconnect their online (and sometimes real-life) presence from the site. Google+ is undeniably late to the party.

But of course, Google is not even trying to topple the mighty giant, if you listen to Google. They have been hammering home the “Google+ is Google” mantra for the past few months. The aforementioned Horowitz recently said that “Google+ is not a siloed product. It is not divorced from the rest of Google, instead it is a new way of using all the Google services that you know and love.”

Or think of it this way: Google says they don’t want Google+ to be a standalone site – just somewhere you go to be on a social network.

“It is a platform which allows us to bring social elements into all the services and products that we offer. So you have seen YouTube come into Google+; you’ve seen Google+ with ‘direct connect’ go into our search business. We are trying to make sure we use social signals across all of our products… It’s not just about getting people together on one site and calling it a social network,” said CBO Nikesh Arora earlier this month.

Google might have a different strategy for Google+ than simply replacing Facebook, but when you think about how much influence Google yields over the web, you can’t imagine that Mark Zuckerberg lets their social initiative stray too far from his mind.

[We previously had the entire interview embedded from YouTube, but it has since been yanked due to copyright claims from the BBC. Those of you in the UK can watch it on the BBC site]