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Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

Not many people seem to understand this. Here's an example from a previous rabbit hole.

The Sherman Fairchild Foundation (which manages the post-humous funds of the guy who made Fairchild Semiconductor) pays its president $500k+ and chairman about the same. https://beta.candid.org/profile/6906786?keyword=Sherman+fair... (Click Form 990 and select a form)

I do love IRS Form 990 in this way. It sheds a lot of light into this.

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Getting paid $500k, while it is a lot of money, is not at all the same as someone benefiting from the profit of a company and making 100s of millions of dollars. $500k doesn't at all seem like an unreasonable salary for someone who is a really good executive and could be managing a for-profit company instead.

Nadella increased the value of MSFT 10x since he took over MSFT. He's worth a heluva lot more than $500k to MSFT shareholders.

Microsoft isn't a non profit, and didn't begin as a non profit. Like how even?

That salary for managing $1B in assets doesn't seem high to me. Am I missing something?

$1bn in assets isn’t much, at the high end you can charge maybe $20mm a year (hedge fund), at the low end a few million (public equity fund). That needs to pay not just execs but accountants, etc.

Put another way, a $1bn hedge fund is considered a small boutique that typically only employs a handful of people.

Those $20m are literally to keep the lights on (base salary, law firm, prime brokers, data feeds, exchange connectivity).

Nobody in the hedge fund world works for salary.

They work for bonuses. Which for $1bn fund should be another $20m or so (20% profit share of 10% returns), otherwise you suck.

If bonuses aren’t available in non-profits, the base salaries should be much higher.

One cool thing is that the these funds don’t actually need active management and that in itself is a form of predatory graft. You could stick them all in a diverse array of index funds and call it a day, as pretty much no fund managers outperform those.

So don't invest in them. (Actually, I agree with you. I don't invest in them.)

I have no idea if the fund is actively managed. I assume the president is mostly fundraising, deciding how to spend the proceeds, and dealing with administration. That's a job, right? Or should we just have robo-foundations?

I once did an elastic search project that indexed the 990 data, and there is a lot of shady shit going on.

I remember one org had so many money pipes going in/out of it that I had to modify my code to make a special case for them.

This sounds absolutely fascinating. Did you write about it/share it anywhere?

So basically the same as a faang staff engineer?

I am a lot more offended or pleased by whether the leader manages a 60MM budget and a 1B endowment than their 500k salary.

There's this weird thing where charities are judged by how much they cost to run and pay their employees to even a greater degree than other organizations, and even by people who would resist that strategy for businesses. It's easy to imagine a good leader executing the mission way more than 500k better than a meh one, and even more dramatically so for 'overhead' in general (as though a nonprofit would consistently be doing their job better by cutting down staffing for vetting grants or improving shipping logistics or whatever).

*offended or pleased by _how well_ the leader manages...

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