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The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profitable source of the $368 million in Foundation assets that parent cited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing of it. |
This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and worked for Sun in the legal department. Netscape recruited her to help set up their legal department and that is how she became an executive at a technology company. She stayed at Netscape when it was bought by AOL to work on policy issues, but was eventually fired during a series of layoffs.
The only "foundational" piece of Mozilla she authored was the Mozilla Public License.
Any company that lost that much market share would have fired their CEO. At a minimum, she should take a deep pay cut and her compensation needs to be tied to performance.