Linus Torvalds was paid $1.6M in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds was paid $1.6M in 2018

projects.propublica.org

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Hard for me to get worked up over this. How much were people like steve jobs or bill gates paid?

If anything he deserves more.

Exactly. I'm happy to see comments like yours. He gave Linux to the world for free and made sure it couldn't be turned into a corporate product. The guy is as close to a hero as we get in tech.

Not just Linux, but Git too. So not only do most of the computers in the world run Linux, there's an entire ecosystem of the Internet based off of one of his side projects. Talk about proving that you're not a one-hit wonder...

You speak like he wrote the Kernel (and Git) all by himself.

At some point he did IIRC.

I agree. I was hoping for a much larger amount and yet expected a much lower amount.

> If anything he deserves more.

I read the title and thought, "That's it?"

So that's a little bit more or roughly comparable to the highest paid engineering positions in FAANG. He deserves 10x more at least.

Linus is not getting stock options from the Linux Foundation, so the cash pay must compensate for that.

Senior VP's at Google earned little over $600,000, but their total compensation was over $50 million in 2020. Linus is giving up extra zero to work for the foundation.

(Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for Github. That business was born from a side project he quickly whipped up.)

He should be the only true billionaire, known for making such a positive impact to the world and community..

Good for him. Hope his takeaway increases. He earned it.

This brought back a thought I recently had: Is there any kind of public succession plan for when Linus eventually dies?

Use something like FleshGolem to install a recent release of Vüdü with at least a 5.1 kernel.

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-l...

Honestly that’s low compared to how important he is to the Kernel.

I agree. But tbh when I first searched for the data I was worried the amount would be even less than this...

Does anyone have any idea about what exactly constitutes the "Other" column ? I don't know how to read the table for a foundation, so it's not clear if it's just "bonuses", taken from the general budget, or if it might be something else (say, "speaker fees" or "consulting" gigs that are done in his name, but channel through the foundation, etc... No idea what I'm taking about, here, so just curious !)

Underpaid TBH.

Why was this flagged?!

Probably because the headline is misleading. He doesn't get paid 1.6M (which he would be very well entitled to if you ask me).

For example if you you look at the report you can see that 900K of the total 1.6M is listed as "Retirement and other deferred compensation". I don't know what that means but "deferred compensation" seems to me like something else then getting paid. Paid means "money in hand" in my books. Everything else is compensation.

No, “deferred compensation” is very much money that has been paid to you, but you don’t immediately have access to it because it is stored in an account with some kind of restriction, like a 401k or IRA. This is done to avoid having to pay a huge amount of taxes in one year, so the payments can be spread out over multiple years. There is almost always an option to invest the money so you don’t miss out on gains while you’re waiting for each payout.

HN is just beyond me sometimes. No reasons for flagging this whatsoever.

Why not ask dang?

He could incorporate and become a deca-billionaire overnight.

He is incorporated, but as a foundation, not as a company.

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