For that audience, a top economist could be a good choice for the same money.

Links to that actually happening is exactly the kind of evidence I'm asking for.

Links to that actually happening *for non government officials* is exactly the kind of evidence I'm asking for.

Here's an article about them: Matthew Mcconughey got $135k for one at the University of Houston; Katie Courik got $110k for speaking at the University of Oklahoma in 2006. Crucially, the article notes that a) fees are often confidential, but can go up to half a million dollars(!) and b) schools try to bargain them down.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/02/matthew-mccon...

Many universities also have "lecture funds" with pretty hefty budgets. I was not privy to the exact numbers, but assuming they run at cost, ticket price*capacity suggests some people are commanding six figures.

Edit: here's a link, since it only takes 10 seconds to find: https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/discover-your-speaker.ph...

Notable: Ava DuVernay (film director) starts at $200k. Tim Ferriss says $100k-$200k. Viola Davis: $200k and up. I'm certain that none of these people are obligated to these prices; if Citadel is buying, anyone would be silly to not raise the price. Conversely, all are certainly able to make speeches at discounted rates or gratis to schools, nonprofits, etc.

Also notable (because it refutes your priors) is a lack of public officials, or those who have held public office.

Edit (again): Here are private economists who make bank for speeches: https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/searchresults/economist#...

Sort by price and you'll see that people do hire economists to speak for six figures, even if they have no nexus to government. Yellen is higher-profile than most of these, and again anyone would be foolhardy to not double their rate for Citadel.

Here's Dan Schulman at Goldman Sachs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q_jVu5T80g

Or at a conference that runs $2300-$7000/head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q_jVu5T80g

This is admittedly a little bit murky, since some of these appearances might be part of the person's "day job": Helmut Panke talked at a bunch of auto shows about BWM and its new products. The ones I linked above, however, seem like they're probably not.

I'm not inviting Alec Baldwin for his knowledge / advice.

Are you saying Yellen is not being paid for her knowledge / advice?

It doesn't seem like a crazy idea for a corporate retreat-style event. Have a day full of internal presentations reviewing the last year, describing future initiatives, etc. After dinner, Yellen talks, telling some stories about her time on the Fed, working with Clinton, and maybe caps it off with a section about "Future Challenges." People like hearing/meeting celebrities, so it caps the day off nicely while being reasonably educational too.

People spent the energy to provide sources. Are you spending the same time?

What sources provides you the confidence to say that some demographics are "overwhelmingly dominated"...?

And that's exactly the bias I'm trying to eliminate with my question.

I am struggling to think that there are any examples that you won't dismiss, no matter how applicable.

Dan Schulman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Dr. Helmut Panke. And now I'm bored of scrolling through.

There is another bin that is "paid for brand-building advertisement." - i.e. celebrities.

The proposition is that ex-government officials are just getting paid market rate for her knowledge and insight.

If that's the case, it should be trivially easy to find non government officials people getting paid $300k a speech for their knowledge.

You've identified listings - which is better than I thought there would be ! - but not sales.

Yellen earned $7.2m in two years. If all three of those combined earned half as much in speaking fees over that same time, I'd be definitely convinced that it's ho-hum

If you're a motivated research reading this interested in answering this empirically, I'd suggest trying to find organizations that both pay this level of fees and have to disclose it to the public when they do (I'm hoping this might be the case for public companies under SEC regs, but that's just a hope)