This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more than $400k a year. And now with Mozilla planning to release a pay-per-month browser (because their half a billion dollars in revenue just isn't enough!), we can expect to see that executive compensation skyrocket even further.
What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice.
Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not picking on Mozilla), I think it’s hypocritical when non-execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would make at a for-profit because “our mission!”, while execs justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they could make at a for-profit. Shouldn’t executives be __more__ committed to the mission?
> The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary
No it isn't - salary is salary, and these deals existed when the Mozilla CEO was not paid as much. By her own admission, at one point Baker just went "fuck it, other CEOs get paid multiples, why not me?", so now she brings home $3m per year, with the whole exec structure likely benefiting in similar fashion (because why only the CEO?). See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too.
That's $3m that could pay for a dozen engineers at Bay-Area salaries, or 30-60 in cheaper locations - maybe enough to match (or surpass) Google's continuous push for new specifications that forces everyone else to play catch-up all the time, as well as stacking the standard committees where Mozilla is systematically overpowered.
> I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary
You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary. Even with 7 years of inflation, that's a lot more.
Mitchell Baker has given a lot to Mozilla, but she's now very clearly decided it's her time to cash in.
This assumes that executives being poached would lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs.
If executive pay was rationally based, that might be true. But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. More likely it would result in someone being promoted to executive and business continuing as usual.
The poaching companies are going to run out of places to put executives long before Mozilla runs out of competent employees who could run the company. In the meantime Mozilla gains a great reputation as a place to work if you want to get poached to a million dollar salary job, so it gains access to lots more competent engineers.
Or at least I think that's the sane argument for why Mozilla executives (and most companies executives) should be payed less. I'm not totally convinced that all the premises are true.
This line is trotted out all the time... but her salary also was going up as revenues and earnings kept going up. From 2005 to 2022 revenues grew more than 10 fold, from 52M$ to 593M$.
In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.
Her compensation is ahead of the median for companies in the 0.1-1 billion revenue range, but in line with the median CEO compensation for a company with 1-5 billion in revenues:
So if you accept that this is an unusually complex CEO role, then it does not seems disproportionate (when judged relative to the absurd disproportionate growth of CEO compensation overall).
"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.
Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.
They're all failures and have no self awareness.
Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off
It really wasn’t clear to me at all until I read this comment. I interpreted the tweet (and GP) to mean “this chart tracks CEO pay at Mozilla, regardless of who the CEO is.” Seeing this comment completely changed the perspective for me, so it was helpful.
See how the last year on that graph is 2018? Baker became interim CEO when Chris Beard stepped down in December 2019, officially hired around April of 2020. It also never reaches $3m.
Additionally, look at the ~2015-2018 revenue. That is when Mozilla was with Yahoo and making ~$500 million a year as opposes to the ~$300 million now. That is when the CEO pay spiked, I doubt it's stayed that high and they arguably deserved that pay for earning enough extra money to prevent needing these ads for an additional five years.
>You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary.
Just to drill this home, Baker's CEO salary is not currently public.
In 2010 it was a tenth of a billion dollars. If any public company went from revenues of $120 million to $560 million executives would unquestionably get a raise.
And then when the revenue goes down to something like $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO stepping down and the number of executives getting cut. Like what happened with Mozilla.
These are exceptional times. The original Mozilla posts mentioned the effects COVID19 had on their business.
CEOs of much larger companies, with much larger salaries, have cut or take no salary. Here's a short list of some
Lyft, Fiat Chrysler, GE, Delta, Alaska Airlines, United, Southwest, Jetblue, AirBnB, GE, NBA
How is it not incredibly tone deaf to cut 25% of the company and not at least in a token gesture temporarily eliminate your salary when you're literally a multimillionaire.
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Also,
>And you do want highly qualified people there.
That would be one thing if Mozilla was in a period of great growth. But it's not; it's in steady decline. Yet c-suite salary has grown in inverse proportion. Highly qualified? Are they?
Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.
It's important to distinguish between "excessive executive pay" and "corruption" (bribery).
Excessive executive pay is common in private firms, of course, but in that case, the shareholders have some incentive to ask the CEO to take a pay cut and hand the money back to shareholders. As a result, we don't regard it as "corruption" when the CEO convinces the board of directors to raise executive pay. The shareholders may be acting wisely or foolishly, but it's "their money" to waste.
But in public organizations like these, with significant revenues (FIFA and IOC make most of their money from selling broadcasting rights, etc.; Nominet makes their money from domain registration fees), nobody's incentivized to keep executive pay low, but we all find it morally disgusting when they keep a lot of money that "should" have been used to promote the public good.
See also Mozilla's executive leadership. Mozilla makes their money from Google. Mozilla is "supposed" to use that money to continue its mission, ("We're building a better internet, ensurig the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all") but when Mitchell Baker takes home $2.4m in salary, there's nobody with skin in the game to say "no, that money should go back to Mozilla so we can use it to build a better internet."
Your suggestion to set up an auditor/oversight board is what causes the bribery. IOC has an ethics committee, but their skin isn't in the game either, so it's easy to offer them bribes to look the other way, allowing executives and the ethics committee to take their cut.
A counterpoint with 5 minutes of searching: from [1], Peter Kern (3rd highest paid CEO) got $296M in 2022 overseeing ~15k employees (from [2]). Distribute that salary evenly and everyone gets a ~19k boost which, on an average base of $108k (from [3]), is about +17%, if I'm not mistaken.
If you want an even more ludicrous example, David Baszucki (Roblox, 7th highest, also [1]) got $232M in 2022 overseeing ~1600 employees (from [4]). Even distribution gives a $145k boost on an average base of ~$135k (from [5]) is about +107%. Which is a bit better than Intel's +0.2%, no?
In summary, you can pick and choose examples to make either point.
Honest question: If rank-and-file employees are expected to work for market rates, should executives be expected to work for market rates also? Or do we think they should work for less than market rates? If so, wouldn't Mozilla be at risk of having their executives poached by higher paying companies, which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs?
If someone's gonna downvote me I'd appreciate some color on your choice too, thanks. ;-)
How much does the Mozilla CEO deserve? I know the tech salaries and I believe a comparable role (senior director or VP) in a Faang would at least be 7 figures, can we try to ballpark by how much we are over (or under) paying the CEO?
What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice.
[1] - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo...
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637
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