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Comment by thoraway329 | Hacker News Reader

Yes I know and it does disgust me. I wasn't talking about IT staff and regular employees. The CEO founded the "company", does he really need to incentivise himself with a near million dollars a year? I thought NPOs were created by people who want to change the world, but with this salary it seriously skews my perception of his true intentions.

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Since it’s a non-profit there are no shares or shareholders and he has no equity, ie the salary is the only way he financially benefits from the success of the organization. 800k is a lot of money but it doesn’t seem outlandish to me, considering the impact and popularity. Why should you need to choose between doing good and doing well?

That's all well and good until you start asking for extra donations during a pandemic that will be followed by a major recession. If you are going to do that, you should probably make a gesture as well. CEOs of various companies have been cutting their pay as a gesture for the duration of the pandemic.

CEOs at other companies have other types of compensation through stocks and bonus pays, years before. Sal Khan's societal impact is huge.

But why not talk about the IT staff? You want their site to run to well right? You want some decent site reliability engineers right? Well you might find some that will do the job for less then they can earn for the same role in the for-profit world, you are still going to have to pay a decent wage for their skill and let’s be honest here so they can continue to live in a comfort they have become accustomed too.

The CEO doesn’t earn no where near the CEO’s for other charities in the US go have a look over here https://www.charitywatch.org/top-charity-salaries

Edit: You can “change the world” (even if it’s a very small change, in a small part of the world) and still earn a fair living for your actions. You are completely free to feel that 800k isn’t fair payment. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m not embedded into khan to know if he is really worth that paycheque. But I know the charity hasn’t been run into the ground.

Then let's talk about the IT staff. What is their salary? How many of them the "non-profits" could hire if their CEO had a more decent salary?

The organizations we are speaking about are very loud to beg for money yet they spend a large part of it on overpaying a few execs. This is very different from companies that earn their money without asking the public for money.

Quick random google search.

Software engineer Google - Average total compensation: $144,652 (ok written in 2014, like I said it was a quick google search - https://www.infoworld.com/article/3304439/man-or-myth-the-3-... ) Software engineer Khan - Average total compensation: $119,140/yr - https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Khan-Academy-Salaries-E45...

So not that much different to those in similar fields in the similar area.

So if the CEO took a 50% pay cut they could hire and extra 3-4 engineers a year. But that’s just straight salary costs and the cost of staff isn’t just the salary cost.

But that argument can be said of any charity, non-profit, business, school, hospital. “If only the top surgeon took a 50% pay cut, think of all the extra nurses we could hire...”

This 1m/yr is nothing compared to the impact KA has. It's no longer just a site with videos; it is a huge e-learning platform that is widely used and integrated in schools across the world. Being the CEO of KA must be a lot of work and I think most people would agree is worthy of that level of compensation.

Or to put it another way: the government is also a nonprofit organization, but it needs good workers to fulfill its goals and those workers should be fairly compensated. We wouldn't get anywhere if the government paid everyone minimum wage.

No one gets in the government gets paid $800k, the highest paid salary is the president, at $400k.

This is just wrong, here's a quick search and article from Orange County Register listing top paid government workers in California (Since Khan is in CA).

He wouldn't even make the list.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/08/22/top-california-public-...

Who gets to fly around on a taxpayer funded private airplane and spends over 249 days on a golf course costing >130M, 1/2 of which is spent at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but that's totally fine because his salary is less than a Non Profits CEO.

Trump doesn't care about salary because that's an irrelevant portion of the income generated from his presidency.

Singapores ministers are paid good amount, lot of the high level positions make more than million dollars.

If you want skilled people you need to pay a good amount.

You forgot to add few million from lobbyists

Add to that the extra income from illegal such as bribes or the income Trump's orgs like his hotels do, to the legal avenues after the term such as book deals, speaker fees, corporate board memberships, lobbyism deals... the president nominally gets 400k but in reality way, way more than that.

But not out of the pockets of tax payers (or in Khan's case, donations). If people pay for Trump hotels, Trump speaking at their party, Trump endorsing their book, that's not the elected government's choice. Similarly, non-profit CEOs are free to have a hotel chain on the side, but I'm not sure it should come from donations that people gave to the platform.

That said, compared to other ceo salaries I've seen in the USA... This isn't that ridiculous indeed, it gets much worse (and I'm talking only about non-profits).

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