This is the usual salary vs. contractor thing.

You can almost always make more as a contractor because you're shifting risk from the company onto your LLC. They pay for a la carte results instead of paying for an employee who could hypothetically deliver results.

They did because he found a niche where you get paid for results, and there's no pre-vetting.

There's basically no job like this. Any form of pre-vetting, even just a face-to-face, would have excluded him.

By "no one" crapbone meant no single employer. And no single employer paid Santiago the money. It was paid by a group of companies each paying bounties for different bugs.