Ah ha. I read it as saying people getting 300k in cash. It makes more sense now. For me, I'll have to wait out several years until my RSU gets fully vested. Let's hope I don't get fired in the meantime :)
Certain elite grad program dept's might have best-in-world knowledge in a particular niche e.g. ETH Zurich has these acrobatic indoor drones better than even NASA / US Military / Boeing right now. If I were doing a make or break indoor drone startup, it might be worth it to pay a fresh grad to clone his research environment in my company; an aqui-hire of sorts. This escalates when two mega corps, like say Alphabet and Apple fund competing indoor drone companies at the same time.
I think self-driving tech has matured past this phase where a only few key university dept's have most of the intellectual capital, but I still here mid-200k figures for freshly minted PhD's from the right school.
* PhD in deep learning / ML with papers at NIPS/ICML
* Working for BigCo (FAANG)
* Half of that is stock, annually.
* In the bay area or a big city
If you don't hit all those items then you pay is likely more modest. If you are academic, it is still likely laughable.