I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.
[1] https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...
We were and are in the Bay Area, which is every year more expensive, but not 3x more.
It could be the 2.5m/year is justified, but not by market share up, new revenue lines, or both. What else? Competition? No, it is a custom fit job, chair of both boards and now even acting CEO. No competitive recruiting or chance for others to get the job, no real oversight.
If someone said I'll do full-stack dev for 150k instead 400k at google, how would you take that question?
Think about that the next time you're thinking how much of a paycut you'd be willing to take if it meant you didn't have to talk to that guy every week.
That argument is about "how hard/bothersome" the work is. That's not how compensation is set, however.
I, and most developers I presume, also don't like sweeping streets or cleaning gas station toilets (much more than business trips and tons of customer meetings), but nobody would pay millions to some gas station toilet attendant.
You see, I'm fine donating money to a lot of places because I feel like I earn a lot (and I earn about 50k/year, not 150k and I never expect to earn 400k). The Internet Archive, Climeworks, OpenStreetMap, a local hackerspace, random sites or tools that I found useful, etc. But when I see that we need a hundred thousand average-sized donations to cover the cost of a single employee in a non-profit (what is even the definition of that word if not to not turn out profit to its owners?) then we're all just financing a pretty face instead of the product we love. One can argue all one wants about it being the market value or competitive offers or whatever, but if you are only in it for the money, Mozilla should not be the company for you. I'm not financing that. This is also why I don't donate to Wikipedia: the money doesn't actually go to Wikipedia the platform.
Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.
There are 2 parts to the job of CEO:
1. Sales
2. Incentive engineering (overcoming Goodhart's law)
There is very little about software development expertise that will help with either of those endeavors.
Good point, we can pay them much less than developers. Having a warm smile and making informed decisions about ~things is something my mom can do and I assure you her hourly wage is less than a developer's.
Says only someone who hasn't seen what happens when the average IC is forced into management.
You have to find a person with a relevant experience. That's the real bottleneck. Number of people available who have enough track record to be considered to become CEO in a tech company with half a billion in revenue and over thousand employees is small, those who are willing to work for less pay is really small.