Regardless of what happened with him, there's literally no reason to believe that he wouldn't have had the same massive salary if he was still the CEO. Him being technical has nothing to do with taking a massive salary or not, the issue is cultural. Especially when you see the exact same thought process all over this thread, of thinking "But they are a CEO in tech! They deserve it!" instead of keeping in mind the completely different dynamics that apply to non profits. I don't think it has much to do with the CEO themselves
The CEO's "massive salary" isn't the issue. It's the "revenue declining" part. No one would care much about a salary like this for Baker or Eich is Mozilla was actually flourishing. But it certainly is not.
While Firefox market share and revenue is declining, Eich was able to a 200 person browser company from the ground up (based on Chromium). Huge difference between CEO caliber here.
I think we'd all be better off if those efforts would've been combined to making a strong 3rd browser contender, instead of Chrome, Safari, and the peanuts sprinkled across Firefox and Brave separately.
Here's proof salary isn't the issue: not only did I not stay and say whatever it took to give Google antitrust cover while hiking my salary (Mitchell would have been chair, would have had to approve, might have done so provided hers went up too; she always earned a bit more than I did while we were partners from early days), I didn't go to a Big Tech company that pays seven figure salaries to people at my level. I founded a startup and still make a modest (16x smaller than Mitchell's, to be precise) salary.
If I'd stayed at Mozilla, turned around Firefox, spawned other revenue lines, then of course the salary would be high -- it would have to be very high, without any equity upside. This remains a problem for comp at Mozilla from when I was there: we can't compete with Big Tech on RSUs, or even on cash, so we overpay a bit and have a "mission-based" ethos that, over time, tolerated politicking and goldbricking.
