[nuancebydefault]

The value of unpaid work always goes somewhere.

Many sports clubs work with the help of many volunteers. If they were not available to help for free, the practitioners of the sports would need to pay more. That would mean, only the richer part of the candidates could do the sport. A side effect is as well, that the club itself gets bigger, more famous, and richer as a whole. All thanks to the help of volunteers. There is just no way around that.

In SO/Jeff's case this was beneficial for him in the form of a huge selling price. I would say luckily he was, as I read in the comments, a great contributor to the SO organisation.