I worked at a startup where the founders were your age and paid themselves that much while holding their majority stake in stock.

We had open salary bands so we were all paid OK - especially our couple ~entry level folks at $100-120k. It was strange times in my eyes, though. They hired an HR person whose first act was to raise the c-suite salaries to market rate ($200k+) while the business still had negligible income but closed a round.

It is good to be in the owner class, I guess.