What's in it for them, anyway?

So why would they do it? What could make the people running this company accept, even appear content with, an unbroken string of 39 years of consecutive losses?

The answer is really no mystery. For running a company with net margins of roughly minus 2000%, Robert Saxe, chairman, treasurer and founder, takes down a salary of $434,000 in 2003, while president, COO and general counsel Joe Harary collected $390,000 that year. (2004 salaries have not yet been revealed.) Put another way, these two employees collected in salary in 2003 slightly more than the company's last four years of revenue.

Given that those two are the ones basically running the show (Harary more so as of late than Saxe, who is rapidly approaching retirement), it's not particularly hard to figure out why they're pretty well content with the status quo. We all should be able to collect that kind of money for accomplishing so little!

Now, how the board of directors, and the shareholders, are kept happy with such a state of affairs, is another matter. For another post.