Plenty of non-profits give a lot of money to employees. There is nothing stopping non-profits from paying exorbitant sums to their employees, and executives often do get paid exorbitant. Non-profits mean they don't pay out to investors, but they are usually used as a grift to get people to work for less so the top people make more money and do fundraising on their pet projects.

The employees work for the for-profit part of OpenAI.

That is owned by a non-profit organization. It seems like a lot of the employees are chasing money, and forgetting that it's fundamentally not trying to maximize profit. Of course, Sam seems to have perverted its mission to be the latter (serving as the latest high-priest of mammon, like Elias served Lillith)