There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.
I bet any mid level tech manager from a large company (who loves open source) would do a much better job and work for 1/4 her salary until he proved he was worth her old salary and raised the tides of success for the company.
You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.
Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.
Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
Toyota is a huge company though. It's nothing like Mozilla. I would imagine there's a lot of responsibility riding on it. And I'd imagine that in Japanese culture badly performing CEOs actually face consequences.
I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.
I don't believe that for a second. Unless you just mean it in the sense of "90% of people that apply to a job aren't good at it". You can get many many qualified people for $250k.
Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.
