$600k over 5 years is a big amount of money, but probably fairly small compared to his TC as a senior director. Not a great risk/reward tradeoff
Apple is literally swimming in money; my friends who work there are compensated well enough to buy one or more houses in the Bay Area. That's no small feat.
If an apple engineer can't buy a house or two in the bay area, who can?
I think it's safe to say that $600k couldn't have been more than 20-25% of his TC over 5 years, IF that. Absolutely braindead to take that huge a risk for that little reward (not to mention a deeply shitty thing to do given his position, obv). That's not even close to 1x, never mind an order of magnitude!
But it does give a vague idea.
Better than that get a better picture from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that does in fact compile that information for each job and is much harder to fuck with, it's illegal in fact.
Salary data on this forum seem pretty inflated, well it's very warped. It's all to make it seem there's a giant pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if your program compiles and you "get hired."
Imagine if every day you walked past a newsstand, and for some reason there is an envelope with $100K in cash there, every day, all the time. It's totally illegal to take it, but it's right there in front of you, and so easy to grab, and no one's going to notice...probably.
Except someone usually does eventually notice, and most people are smart enough to realise this.