>Salary is absolutely the key factor when people pick jobs.
Eh. It's a key factor. Once you get beyond a certain point, many people take lots of factors into account for jobs that are not otherwise basically interchangeable.
A CEO picking between a $10m / yr gig and a $50m / yr one would have to have rather a lot of soft factors working in favor of the lower paid one to justify it.
I'm not sure. I spent a quarter century in tech, and probably brought in about 20% maybe 255 of what I could have in that same time if I'd have sacrificed my ethics and gone to work for one of the big players rather than a non-profit. I chose not to because I value how I feel about myself more than I value the extra money. I've got a paid for house in the bay area under 3 acres of redwoods, 12 miles from the Googleplex. Sure all that money would be nice, but not at the expense of my conscience.
So, my experience as a non-CEO is that yes, people are willing to take the job that pays 1/5th the salary when it meets their needs and matches their ethics. If I had it to do all over again, I'd make the same choice. I simply couldn't function knowing I spent the most valuable years of my life striving to make rich people richer by tricking poor people into clicking more links.
Almost certainly a lot of that would be variable comp depending upon a bunch of things. And I could also imagine a $10m gig (especially with speculative equity) at a company with really exciting prospects could trump a $50m one for a stodgy company not going anywhere.