Not in dollars, no, but a surprisingly large number of tenure decisions boil down to "does this researcher have a lot of citations to their work?" as a measure of the quality of their research.
Very true! And for the unfortunate ones who get tenture, well they miss out on making bank like the ones who leave academia for industry positions.
Fine, they are fighting like dogs over scraps. Is that a better idiom? Either way the system is broken.