> It is a lot of money in absolute terms, for sure. But why should a CEO accept “a lot of money”, if elsewhere they can get 5x as much? All this moralizing doesn’t help. You can call people greedy as much as you want, but you have to pay market rate or you can’t find a CEO at all. People have no obligation to accept a lower than market rate salary, they have hard power leverage in negotiations in the sense that they can easily walk away from deals where you offer such a “low” salary.

This is not about an abstract CEO. This is about a CEO who is a total utter failure that could only get this job in a non-profit/corp hybrid.