[photochemsyn]

I just looked up the the top CEO salaries of non-profit organizations in the USA - as of 2020, they ranged from about $16 million to $8 million. A non-profit appears to simply be a 'non-stock corporation' and can have the same ridiculouly pyramidal compensation structures that shareholder corporations do.

Overhauling the legal definition of non-profit to require the highest-paid employees to make no more than ~10X as much as the lowest-paid employees would make a lot of sense.

[vidarh]

> Overhauling the legal definition of non-profit to require the highest-paid employees to make no more than ~10X as much as the lowest-paid employees would make a lot of sense.

Very easy to work around by outsourcing most operations. If you really want to prevent high salaries there you'd need to link it to some more fixed measure, such as a multiple of median salary.

[nl]

A non-profit just means excess earnings are reinvested back into the organization instead of having the option of giving them to shareholders.

I think you are confusing non-profit with charity perhaps?

[kkielhofner]

CEO salaries alone are the wrong metric. Not that I'm defending them at all (they're ridiculous) but another way to look at it:

As one example, the CEO of Kaiser was the highest paid nonprofit CEO at ~$18m[0] in 2021. That seems egregious until you realize Kaiser had $93b in revenue in 2021[1].

As one example from healthcare, the CEO of Moderna was paid $18m in 2021[2]. Moderna reported $18b in revenue in 2021[3].

You see this over and over in discussions about nonprofits, charities, etc. In most cases the executive leadership team is running a huge organization - in the case of Kaiser nearly $100b in revenue and 300k employees. Competent leadership at that scale is expensive.

In an ideal world this wouldn't be the case and individuals with these qualifications would be willing to take even more significant pay cuts for the "greater good" of whatever the mission of the nonprofit it. Per usual that's not the world we live in.

Speaking personally, I'd give pause to working with, donating to, etc an organization doing $100b in revenue with an executive team making 1/20 (or whatever) they would make elsewhere. In some limited cases for those who have "made their money" it would be a great thing. For anyone else I would assume they're either taking a HUGE pay cut for the cause (great thing, but unlikely) or completely incompetent, embezzling, etc.

[0] - https://www.erieri.com/blog/post/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-at...

[1] - https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/news/kaiser-foundation-he...

[2] - https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-lobbying/34...

[3] - https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2022/Moder....