Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.
The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.
The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:
1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations
2. breaks even
3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.
In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.
CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.
So where are those millions of dollars to Mozilla from Google really going?
Mozilla has a staff of around 1700 employees in USA, but it has 1000+ volunteers. Are those volunteers getting a fair share of the profits of this non-profit company? If not, why not?
And even with all that half a billion dollars of revenue every year, why is Mozilla Firefox have a barely ~2% market share?
OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..
Why has Firefox failed or deliberately delayed to give basic features for years that its major competitors have had for years?
Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.
e.g., Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
Or is that the implicit deal between Google and Mozilla. "Hey puppet, if you want the carrot, then just keep your head down, and just tick along doing barely anything new, and let me control the world as I see fit."
I'm genuinely wondering: if any other decent non-Chromium FOSS browser got half a billion dollars every year, would it give some tough competition to Chrome and Safari?
The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.
The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:
1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations
2. breaks even
3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.
In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.
CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.