[loeg]

They have approximately $165 million in assets and the total running costs for wikipedia servers are on the order of $2 million a year. They could keep the lights on for wikipedia for something like 80 years without a single dime of additional revenue.

The vast majority of their spending does not go to keeping wikipedia's lights on, and that is the only reason their excess reserves are as low as "four years."

Here's the graph of revenue and spending over time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/User%3AG...

[Abhinav2000]

Yes but the answer would be somewhere in the middle — you need some level of overhead expenses above the bare minimum otherwise the ship will slowly start creaking and falling apart. I didn’t see that much evidence that they were overpaying staff (in contrast to Mozilla), which I apologise to the Author if I missed it.