> Where the money come from ?

Wherever the CEO and chairman's $10m annual package came from. You either pay market rate or risk your employees leaving.

It’s not market rate, it’s geopolitical theater rate. These are rare situations

It might be rare, but right now those engineers are super valuable, and are getting paid for it.

demand and supply.

you see the same thing happen with self driving engineers commanding million dollar packages because they were in such high demand and supply was so low.

They are super valuable now but their value will decrease as the Chinese semiconductor industry catches up, so it's not like TSMC will have to pay 2x the salary forever. However I know many people (not at TSMC) who would take a lower salary to work on green field projects.

Are you suggesting to move some of the CEO allocation to the engineer ? Wouldn't that cause new issue of retaining CEO ?

What we're discussing is that it's hard for a company to pay the market rate when the competition is the CCP itself. The CCP would pay the equivalent of $20 million if it needed to - and what then?

I get the point that everyone is making, including the point that you're trying to make. But if I just take your question at face value, isn't the answer simple: from billions in profit they make per quarter.

So you want to drain your profit to match the salary? I would think it would cause issue with the shareholder and when you want to pay for other future non salary expense, but fine lets ignore that. But what if China simply offer more salary again ? Remember, china has way more money than TSMC or even the whole Taiwan.