With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy/

by billiam • 3 years ago

384 286 3 years ago

rvz• 3 years ago

Mozilla continues to let its users down on privacy by relying on Google's money (>80% of its entire revenue) after the CEO promised that they would move away from them 15 years ago. [0] That did not happen.

Nothing has changed other than declining usage and revenue. But give the CEO another bonus over poor user usage, shrinking market share and destroying the browser, all done by themselves and now are being kept on life support by Google.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

slyall• 3 years ago

They have tried to move away from Google. The problem is none of their other ideas have worked out.

tempest_• 3 years ago

In fact they get chided around here for anything that isnt a firefox specific endevour.

Browser engines are not a money making business (if it was Microsoft would still be in the game)

wkat424215• 3 years ago

Because they're harebrained ideas. I don't want to pay Mozilla for a limited version of mullvad when I can get the full mullvad for less.

I don't think they actually ever expected any of these ideas to work. In the meantime you can't even donate to firefox if you want to, only to the foundation.

I mean, I give money to KDE every month and they manage to build a whole desktop environment. Why can't I do that with Mozilla? Oh wait, how much money does KDE waste on a CEO?

lolinder5• 3 years ago

Here's an idea: provide a donations bucket that gives a guarantee that they'll be earmarked exclusively for Firefox development. Nothing off the top for CEO salaries, nothing siphoned off for random side projects—this bucket should be guaranteed to pay the salaries of Firefox developers.

It might not make millions, but I'd donate in a heartbeat if I knew that my money would actually go to Firefox and not to one of the dozens of random side quests that Mozilla keeps picking up.

vidarh2• 3 years ago

For starters that'd be a reason to cut cost and allocate an increasing proportion of current revenue into a diversified investment portfolio to eventually gradually shift towards being able to at a minimum know they can cost-cut and survive of that investment return should they need to.

If I was aiming to set up a company like Mozilla, I'd want all earnings to go into such a fund, and all costs to come out of buffered investment returns... Yes, significantly slows down the rate you can spend, but it also significantly increases the odds of longevity and independence.

Of course that presumes the goal is to build the organization, not to get personally rich off it.

pseudalopex6• 3 years ago

Mozilla's subscriptions and advertising grew from nothing in 2016 to 13% of revenue in 2022.

Nextgrid12• 3 years ago

Here's an idea: an enterprise/power-user focused browser. The market for productivity tools is huge, and likewise for enterprise security snake oil. The browser, being at the front of most security threats would be a great place to implement security features that might not be entirely snake oil, and The Enterprise will gobble it up and pay up.

cf1241290841• 3 years ago

This might be poor framing. Maybe its for a job well done. A big reason for google funding is fears of monopoly lawsuits. From this perspective a firefox fewer people use is a good thing.

pcdoodle• 3 years ago

I like brave.

sillywalk• 3 years ago

FTA, emphasis mine:

"Chief product officer Steve Teixeira notes in the report the rapid growth of AI and social networks, although warns that Mozilla.social is unlikely to move beyond the experimentation phase in 2024. He says that Mozilla would be "exploring ways to better integrate advertising while adhering to our focus on privacy and choice," including web browsing."

CatWChainsaw3• 3 years ago

Also the part where they need data for AI, so turbocharge the telemetry engines...

(but am I wrong, downvoters? :))) what the hell bone do you have to pick with a fact? "As well as Teixeira's comments regarding advertising, Baker notes: "We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating ... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way."")

elzbardico3• 3 years ago

HN doesn't like some facts. Those disliked facts change over time. Don't overthink it. Downvotes in everything you post should be worrying, an ocasional downvote here and there is actually a good sign that you're not a part of a hive-mind.

jodrellblank• 3 years ago

Downvoting for complaining that downvoters think you're wrong, when downvoters just as likely think your comment is low effort. Even your defense of your comment is "I'm just regurgitating a sentence from the article and adding nothing".

Seattle3503• 3 years ago

Mozilla's corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn't accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn't a charity, management isn't accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker's associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames.

Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.

lacrimacida2• 3 years ago

Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.

That’s the reason firefox will never improve.

omnimus3• 3 years ago

Improve in what sense? As a browser it has bern improving.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

Not sure about the terms of the deal with Google, but it may be that she is trying to extract as much personal gain as she can before the termination date.

Perhaps Google will not continue to fund Mozilla and she will have to go looking for another Sugar Daddy.

webworker3• 3 years ago

Remember last week when we were all supposed to be switching to Firefox to advocate for them?

In 2024, please switch to Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270

Brian_K_White2• 3 years ago

Still true. The reason for that is orthogonal to this.

ta_93905• 3 years ago

People need to pay some inconvenience for the better cause of web usability, privacy, software freedom, etc..

Everybody knows that Linux started with low funding a tiny userbase that had to accept the inconvenience over the year to avoid the project death, now Linux is irreplaceable technology that we rely on more than most popular software, it wouldn't reach that point if users quickly got annoyed and gave up on freedom of software.

mnming• 3 years ago

Hmm, I wonder what will be a good performance metric for a non profit entity CEO? DAU?

jakderrida• 3 years ago

Not to sound like snark, but where does the money even come from? I feel like you've ruled out either donors or investors, which really makes me confused over what's left.

Vinnl• 3 years ago

A significant part is default search engines sharing revenue - primarily Google at the moment. There are also regular customers, for products like Mozilla VPN or Firefox Relay. And there are donors for the non-profit entity as well, as well as for the entity managing Thunderbird.

But the big money maker is Google's revenue share.

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

Mozilla is accountable to Google since Google pays the bills.

shipscode• 3 years ago

Is there some secret FAANG-driven effort to just mess with the Mozilla CEO every couple years? They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.

dchftcs• 3 years ago

It's not worthless; many people still want to like the product and would like the company to improve. Alas it seems to be a lost cause given what's discussed over the years, better move on and use the energy to support a browser focused on user experience that actually has a future.

Jensson• 3 years ago

They’re a seemingly worthless company to attract so much heat for their executives.

Most nerds used Firefox so they didn't use to be worthless, and those nerds care about what happened to the company.

naremu• 3 years ago

I think many people here probably use Firefox to some degree and are concerned at the sustainability of the entity that makes it, especially since it seems to follow a for-profit trend of higher executive pay even though it's non-profit and not on the most stable, defensible grounds compared to competing software.

MBCook21• 3 years ago

That’s the bit that really burns for me. I don’t know if they can make enough money for Firefox to survive.

But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?

Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it.

If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are.

Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.

MBCook21• 3 years ago

Even if you’re not a Firefox user, Firefox and Safari are the only two things keeping Chrome from total dominance.

A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.

There are basically three rendering engines right now. One dominates massively and one looks not long for the world.

That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.

ramesh312• 3 years ago

That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.

...so make it your daily browser?

Seriously, there's no reason at all to still be using Chrome. There was a dip in the mid/late 2010s where FF was a joke in comparison, but they're more or less identical in performance at this point.

Dalewyn4• 3 years ago

Firefox and Safari are the only two things keeping Chrome from total dominance.

Safari yes, but truthfully nobody gives a damn about Firefox at this point.

A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.

"A lot" meaning a minority of a minority of people. Lest we forget, iOS is superior to Android in at least the US and Japan, and MacOS continues to gain market share at the cost of Windows.

Most people like (or at least want) Apple.

betaby• 3 years ago

There are basically three rendering engines right now

Genially curious, which ones? I only know two:

1) khtml based - Chrome/Edge/Safari 2) Gecko based - Firefox

Third would be Servo? Any browser uses it?

charcircuit5• 3 years ago

You are forgetting Edge.

That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me.

Nothing is stopping alternate rendering engines from being created, but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser the resources might be better spent being invested in the most popular one that way it improves the web for the most people.

Klonoar• 3 years ago

It’s Safari doing it by way of iOS. If you remove that, neither Safari nor Firefox make much of a dent.

CatWChainsaw3• 3 years ago

Making firefox your daily browser would do a lot for making sure it doesn't die...

perryizgr8• 3 years ago

A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple

Also the fact that most people cannot use it. The vast majority do not have a MacOS computer or Ios phone/tablet.

boomboomsubban2• 3 years ago

Most companies aren't connected to a nonprofit, so don't need to publish their financial information in such detail.

plsbenice34• 3 years ago

I think it makes perfect sense that money would be flowing from powerful entities in a way that cripples Mozilla. The CEO is getting rewarded for their lack of performance as a competitor to Google Chrome. Controlled opposition and so on.

admax88qqq• 3 years ago

Who sets the CEO pay for Mozilla?

Is there a board that actually looked at their performance and decided a raise was appropriate? Or is it due to some term in her contract?

AwaAwa2• 3 years ago

Her friends on the board. This isn't a joke, and you can easily look it up.

bawolff3• 3 years ago

You say that as if its shocking.

Obviously the board sets ceo compensation. That is why boards exist.

cyanydeez• 3 years ago

that's basically cumulative inflation since 2019.

COGlory8• 3 years ago

Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron, surrounding herself with even bigger morons who have taken Firefox every direction except a good direction. Frankly, it's impressive how much they've missed and how far they've shifted from their original mission. Yet her salary has more than quadrupled since she took her position.

Don't forget this phenomenal Baker quote from a few years ago:

In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]

I wonder whether Eich manages to turn around the Firefox decline if he hadn't been given the boot. It started under him, but his latest venture (Brave) is growing steadily - 65 million monthly active users [1].

Mozilla needs to be at the very heart of the free an open web. They need to have the biggest Mastodon instance that you can actually depend on. They need to have the biggest Matrix server. They need to have the biggest free blogging platform. They need to hire a few full time community managers to spearhead putting together a clear set of community guidelines and organizing volunteer moderators. People all the way up the chain, accountability and responsiveness all the way up the chain. The anti-big tech. They could easily afford this, too. If it's free and open on the internet, Mozilla needs to be there. But instead they take half-hearted stabs, abandon them, let Firefox linger, and pay their CEO millions upon millions of dollars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

[1] https://brave.com/transparency/

Dalewyn4• 3 years ago

Mitchell Baker is frankly a moron

Mitchell Baker is a bloody genius, this is a woman who heads both the foundation and the corporation to make literally several millions while ostensibly claiming to champion the right to freedom of information and communications.

What she is doing is unethical and suspect as hell, but so long as she can keep getting away with it she is absolutely not a moron.

As the old saying goes: If it's stupid but it works, it ain't stupid.

Note that "works" here does not mean furthering Mozilla's mission, it means securing a fat paycheck off her fiefdom.

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

Not being able to create a success and instead making personal wealth by siphoning money through someone else's creation while it rots is not a quality I would label as genius.

userbinator• 3 years ago

In other words, sly as a fox.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

That doesn't make a person a genius. It makes them a sociopath. What they are doing is not intellectually difficult and actually requires low emotional intelligence usually.

I can't speak toward her specifically in all honesty. I would need to research it further. But a policy of reward/praising all the con-men (using that phrase loosely) in America is a bad policy.

swells34• 3 years ago

Someone who was a genius wouldn't strangle their cash cow just to have a steak dinner. She's ruthless, conniving, and short sighted. Perhaps she knows she's incapable of improving the business, in which case stealing more money from it before it goes under makes sense.

lannisterstark• 3 years ago

I mean, it's still stupid. It just works.

AwaAwa2• 3 years ago

It seems to me that Mozilla mission is more about doing 'just enough' to ensure Mitchell has a good Xmas every year.

Fire this Fox and go back to Mozilla minus One. If nothing else, the movie rights to this would make more sense than their current direction.

silisili• 3 years ago

I think he could have turned it around, but I'm glad Brave exists.

People hate BAT for reasons, but the idea of controlling the ad stream at the software level is a winning one to me. I can't think of any other platform where ads were given such free reign. Could you imagine watching TV, then a commercial comes on that either a) crashes the tv, or b) changes the channel multiple times so you can't get back, or c) installs malware onto the tv, or d) clones itself 20 times over the content you were watching, or any other fun stuff web ads have been known to do.

throwaway3078• 3 years ago

Eich was CTO of the Mozilla Corporation since its founding in 2005 until 2014, during which Firefox market share slid from its peak at 30% to 13%.

What would Eich have done as CEO to turn around Firefox that he wasn’t able to do as CTO for nine years? That said, Brave has innovated and had some VC-fueled success. I just don’t see him as the Firefox savior some people do.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2009-...

wkat424215• 3 years ago

But Firefox can control the ad stream very well with ublock origin. Don't need bat tokens for that.

The advertising industry will never take that as an option anyway. They're addicted to big data now. They have to sell a hell of a lot of less-annoying non-data-mined BAT ads to compensate, or do with less profit. They're not going to be on board.

And these tokens don't really solve the issue. People hate ads. Trading their ads for slightly less annoying ones when they can do without them altogether is not going to work. How many of those 65M brave users actually opt in to the BAT ads?

It's just a non-starter and will always be that. Sorry. It's just another fairytale spun to dig into VC money pools.

lupusreal• 3 years ago

Mozilla doesn't need any Mastadon instance. They need to stop pretending to be a social media company and focus all their resources on browser development.

Their only reason for being involved in social media in the first place is because it gives them a plaything for their forays into censorship and narrative engineering. This is one aspect of the cancer Mitchell Baker has been cultivating in Mozilla

COGlory8• 3 years ago

Firefox engineering is in a pretty good spot. What they need now is clout and market share to bring in income and brand awareness. I'm not sure how else to achieve that? They need people to associate them with being the good stewards. Best way to do that is to be a good steward.

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...

jay_kyburz• 3 years ago

I would have liked them to double down on that mobile OS they were working on a few years ago.

whakim2• 3 years ago

I don't understand this oft-regurgitated opinion that Mozilla needs to "focus all their resources on browser development." Mozilla does focus a large portion of their resources on browser development. Firefox is fast enough and has an interface that's largely similar to its main competitors. It works pretty well. This is a browser we're talking about. What special features do you think Mozilla could build that'll magically allow Firefox to claw back huge chunks of market share? And why do you think that Mozilla isn't building those features due to lack of focus - surely they build browser features and do other things simultaneously? In my opinion, building a killer non-browser thing might be one of the only ways to save Firefox - after all, the history of browsers shows us that successful ones typically piggyback off of successful non-browser things (Windows, Google, iPhone, etc.)

Gigachad• 3 years ago

Firefox as a browser is doomed no matter what Mozilla does. People installed Firefox because the default browser sucked. Now the default browser doesn’t suck.

throwawayzilla• 3 years ago

When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

I was working at Mozilla when she made this comment -- shortly after laying off ~25% of the fucking company -- and it was the final straw for me. I can't speak to whether it was the final straw for others as well, but I can say that in the span of about 8-9 months after those layoffs every single person on my team, many who had been there 5+ years, quit and took "normal" tech industry jobs that typically paid 2-2.5x more than Mozilla. Apparently in Baker's mind it's OK to ask the people doing the actual work to take a massive discount to their compensation for ideological reasons, but when it interferes with her lavish lifestyle it's suddenly unthinkable.

She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck, and at this point I've just sort of grudgingly accepted that she'll only leave once she's drained every last drop of blood she can get from the company and from the well-meaning and dedicated people trying to make a genuinely independent web browser. All I can hope is that some sort of phoenix (get it?) manages to arise from the ashes when that finally happens.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

I applaud your decision! Need more people standing on principle

chii4• 3 years ago

She is truly an anchor around Mozilla's neck

perhaps it's because this is what google wants mozilla to be - a lame duck that cannot compete against chrome.

mattmaroon• 3 years ago

Mozilla itself is a Phoenix (and I miss that) that arose from ashes so maybe!

scarface_74• 3 years ago

So how is doing all of this “free” stuff going to increase revenue?

qp11• 3 years ago

What the above lacks is a finance model of how to make it work with real numbers.

wmf• 3 years ago

$500M per year isn't enough to develop and market a browser?

dang2• 3 years ago

Please don't post personal attacks to HN, and please follow the site guidelines in general, including the one about not calling names, and also the one about not fulminating:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We particularly don't want mob dynamics here.

p.s. I have zero opinion about this person or this organization, just in case anyone is worried about that. I just care about preserving HN for curious conversation, which is what the guidelines are written to convey.

COGlory8• 3 years ago

I'm pretty surprised to be seeing this comment because I don't think this is a particularly personal attack since it's a public figure with measurable performance, and I feel as though I frequently see similar comments about Musk, Bezos, etc. Is it acceptable to change it to "is behaving like a moron" and "surrounded herself with people who make moronic decisions"?

COGlory8• 3 years ago

I can't edit this one anymore, but in light of being reminded of the community guidelines, I will offer instead that Mitchell is not a moron, but is making decisions that are extremely questionable in light of the stated goals of the Mozilla foundation, and has failed to execute well enough and quickly enough to the point that it calls into question her competence.

BrendanEich5• 3 years ago

Honestly, Mitchell is making about 16x what I make, so she's not stupid. Staying at Mozilla, hiking my own salary, pandering to politically powerful factions... I am glad I didn't stay to face those temptations. But as I've written elsewhere, I could not have done what needed doing at Mozilla.

bloopernova• 3 years ago

And how does that raise compare with other CEOs of similar organizations?

Not that I think CEOs are worth their ludicrous salaries. It's just that the anti-diversity crowd loves to attack any organization they set their sights on for being "too progressive". So it's relevant to know whether this really is extraordinary.

COGlory8• 3 years ago

What is another similar organization?

terminous2• 3 years ago

For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021

Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

MBCook21• 3 years ago

While you’re right about that, the fact that they seem to have been trending downward for a very long time suggests they need someone new, whoever it is, and at a minimum should not be encouraging the current CEO with a raise.

FF seems to be in serious trouble. The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.

pseudalopex6• 3 years ago

The money mostly seems to go to a lot of different things that keep changing that are not the one thing that people use and want.

What do you believe they spend more on than Firefox?

wkat424215• 3 years ago

Mozilla deserves a lot of criticism. It doesn't need the anti diversity crowd for that. It's its own worst enemy right now (and it really starts with Baker). Diversity (which I really support) has nothing to do with it.

What they have to do is put firefox back on the map. They deserve criticism for not doing that and for failing at their mission of an open web.

lolinder5• 3 years ago

The hate for Mozilla on HN has very little to do with diversity and almost everything to do with people who want Firefox to keep Chrome at bay and are frustrated at Mozilla's paying attention to everything but Firefox.

Mozilla feels the need to jump on every new tech fad instead of focusing their efforts on making a really great, sustainable browser, which is what I personally wish was their core mission.

times_trw2• 3 years ago

How does that compare to a company which has lost 95% of their market share in the last 15 years?

mardifoufs3• 3 years ago

Siding with a millionaire CEO to own the anti wokes is quite a take. Also, even if her peers were just as well paid, it's well known and normal for not for profits to pay a lot less than "private" for profit businesses. Expecting non profit CEOs to have a salary that trends similarly to those in big/mid tech is a bit weird, why not just go work for big tech if she is on the same level as her well paid peers? Also even for a non profit, it's a bit... brazen to still keep increasing the already massive salary even when clearly the organization is doing a lot worse in terms of meeting its own objectives than before.

hipadev23• 3 years ago

Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago

ramesh312• 3 years ago

Interesting contrast to the "everyone should use firefox in 2024" #1 article from a few days ago

Firefox is an unqualified good to the world. Mozilla (as the nonprofit we once all knew and trusted) ceased to really exist years ago.

Just another zombie corp bumbling along into discount acquistion/liquidation at this point. Once Google stops paying the bills, it'll be stripped for parts and join Netscape in heaven.

stephen_g2• 3 years ago

I believe Firefox is a decent browser in spite of the CEO of the organisation.

It's 100% rational to hold the positions that the CEO has performed poorly and doesn't deserve anything like the salary they are paid (and should probably be removed), at the same time as believing that the people working on Firefox have managed to do a quite good job in spite of the terrible leadership.

oarla• 3 years ago

If the CEO is being rewarded for declining revenue and users, then that's what the CEO was hired to do. Can't understand why the board wants lower revenue and user share.

ergocoder• 3 years ago

It is a non profit. Having less revenue is a win. Duh.

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

The board knows the ship is sinking. You and I would work hard to keep it afloat. They’re working hard to loot the hold of everything they can cart off and sell before it sinks.

npteljes3• 3 years ago

You might be downvoted, but "looting" matches my impression with regards to Mozilla and its current CEO. If I were to guess, they'll stay until it's this profitable, and when the Google money finally goes away, they will too, onto the next victim.

ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million

In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, After previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). B

Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

elzbardico3• 3 years ago

So, people were stuck at their homes, with no other things to do than engaging electronically with the rest of the world, but this, somehow created problems for Mozilla, a company that builds a fucking web browser?

Zuiii• 3 years ago

Are there penalties for ceos that knowingly issue false statements? Lots of execs lie these days.

g-b-r5• 3 years ago

To be fair, she did a great job for who's actually paying (Google)

npteljes3• 3 years ago

This is the correct answer here. The CEO blood-boilingly doesn't make sense, if looking at the organization as a technological steward of Firefox and maybe related technologies. But the CEO and Firefox are just there, year after year. So maybe it's not the organization that's wrong, but rather the way of looking at them.

So, as you say, if one shifts the perspective, to look at Google, using what's pocket change to them to keep a competitor alive, in order to keep them out of anti-trust and continue to let them dictate how the web is shaped, it suddenly makes sense.

grecy3• 3 years ago

* ..her salary had risen to over $3 million 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million, 2022 her salary rose again to nearly $7 million .. In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues *

This is the plague that is currently overtaking all large corporations, and I can't help but think the workers are going to revolt, and they're going to do it soon.

The UAW strike seemed very tame compared to what is to come.

wkat424215• 3 years ago

Most workers actually welcome these practices because they're led to believe that they themselves could one day end up in that chair.

Of course the system is rigged but they don't know that.

raxxorraxor• 3 years ago

They should revolt and this management "culture" of severely inflated compensation is decadent to the core. Especially since a CEO doesn't really create value at a company like Mozilla, nor are executive decisions too relevant.

Not saying Mozilla is in an easy position, but everyone could do her job without significantly influencing business results.

webworker3• 3 years ago

IIRC, didn't they layoff the rust engineers who did all that work on quantum?

pseudalopex6• 3 years ago

Rust code was a small part of Quantum. Did you mean Servo?

alberth• 3 years ago

Mozilla seems to be in a lose-lose situation with HN crowd.

When they attempt to diversify their revenue with VPN, email tokenization, etc, (things not tied to Google revenue) … HN crowd ridicules them for not being focused on gaining browser share.

When it comes to Firefox, it seems few have even given it a fair try anytime recently.

(How can they gain share when HN doesn’t give them a try)

Irony is, HN loves Rust. And Rust was created at Mozilla.

Note: I have no ties to Mozilla and am a Safari user.

lolinder5• 3 years ago

You're talking as though HN is a monolithic entity with a single opinion.

There are some HNers (myself included) who hate the direction that Mozilla is going under Baker. I want Mozilla to give me an option to put money into a bucket that will directly pay for browser development, the way that restaurants have a tip jar that goes directly to the employees. I want that because I use Firefox as a daily driver and want it to survive, and the way Mozilla spends the donations they get to the org as a whole isn't helpful to that end.

Separately, there are other HNers who still think of Firefox as the slow dinosaur that Chrome unseated. These HNers likely don't have a strong opinion about Mitchell Baker because they have no skin in the game.

And even more separately there are other HNers who love Rust. That Rust originally came from Mozilla may or may not even matter to these HNers. They probably do remember the day that Mitchell Baker laid off the whole Rust team, though.

wkat424215• 3 years ago

Well I use Firefox but I hate their harebrained monetisation schemes. And anyone with any idea of business knows they'll never pull in the money they need. Whatever the answer is, this isn't it.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

Mozilla shut down the Rust team to focus on Firefox.

blitz_skull• 3 years ago

I’m way closer to paying for Kagi than I am to paying for Firefox. Sure “apples to oranges” and all that, but if Kagi slapped a coat of paint on a shitty electron app, gave me bookmarks, profiles (for dev testing a la containers in Firefox), and asked me to cough up $10-$15 / month for it? Done. Paid. Maybe even a tip on top.

What the hell does Firefox bring to the table? Sure they’re open source and “competition” to Google but come on… surely we can all see those aren’t features, they aren’t products, they’re bullet points.

Nextgrid12• 3 years ago

Kagi actually does make their own browser (Mac-only and Webkit-based): https://kagi.com/orion/

It's everything that Firefox should be and misleadingly claims to be. Unlike Firefox, Orion actually has ad blocking by default.

sureglymop• 3 years ago

Genuine question: can anyone explain CEO pay to me? I fail to understand why it is commonly accepted that one or a few people can earn n times more than the average worker actually responsible for creating value. It doesn't seem meritocratic at all... Even in software engineering where we are arguably spoiled to be able to do interesting work possibly from home for upwards of 100k a year, what is the incentive to actually want to do work, if someone else can unjustifiably make 7m a year? So how is it possible that we as humans collectively just accept this, also psychologically speaking?

sackfield2• 3 years ago

What usually happens here is the board of a company say to themselves "Let's hire a professional CEO", the next answer then is how, you don't see these jobs advertised on LinkedIn, so they get a talent recruitment agency. For C level management positions there are usually 2 options that control the most of the market, these 2 options have rosters of people from well known business schools with experience ready to step in.

Because the supply is constrained by these companies the CEO pay increases well beyond market rates, as each CEO will earn X% more than the one before it by faking competitiveness, then the former CEOs will complain (as the Mozilla CEO did here) about relative market rates of other CEOs, even though the market rates are set by the cartel that proposed them in the first place.

The board not wanting to rock the boat for the shareholders will generally agree to this extortion for optics, and round and round the merry go round goes.

makestuff2• 3 years ago

What are the two companies that control the market?

sneak• 3 years ago

This makes no sense. There are too many companies and too many boards that could just hire any old MBA off the street for non-CEO-cartel prices and get the job done.

There is no constrained supply of people willing to be the Mozilla CEO for, say, $2M/year.

wkat424215• 3 years ago

Also when you buy a CEO you buy their old boys network with it. This is a big part of the high salaries and why it's such an in-crowd.

FredPret• 3 years ago

How can CEO pay increase “beyond market rates”?

They get paid what they get paid and that is by definition market rates.

The supply constraint is not due to recruitment companies somehow cornering the CEO market - the very idea is absurd.

It’s because large companies need someone with incredibly deep and broad experience to do a job that has a 50/50 chance of going well, a 100% chance of being blamed when things go wrong, a 1% of getting due credit when it’s due, and a 100% chance of copping flak from legions of armchair critics like you.

acover• 3 years ago

A good CEO can earn you way more than they cost.

Why do Realtors earn 2.5% of a house they sell? Because sellers are nervous it'll cost them more not to pay.

richbell• 3 years ago

Why do Realtors earn 2.5% of a house they sell? Because sellers are nervous it'll cost them more not to pay.

That's debatable.

Where I live realtors are seen as slimy as used car salesmen. It's an open secret that realtors will steer their clients away from low commission or independently listed properties.

rileymat2• 3 years ago

Realtors is a bad example. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/inflated-real-estate-co...

mr_toad• 3 years ago

There’s a huge downside to hiring a bad CEO (or a bad realtor, or even a bad plumber), so people want the best.

Also, shareholders should be free to pay whatever they want, the same as homeowners.

If you tried to tell me what rate I should be paying my plumber based on some moral reasoning I’d nod and ignore you, and as a shareholder I likely don’t want your opinion either.

dekhn• 3 years ago

Although I generally think most CEOs are overpaid, remember: they are legally accountable for the behavior of the organization. For example, David Drummond, who was Chief Legal Officer at Google (until it turned out he was impregnating people who reported to him) was convicted in a lawsuit in Italy, sentenced to prison, and there was a warrant for his arrest if he entered. This was over a video on a part of google that David had no real oversight on, where Google removed a video within only minutes of the issue being reported.

I figure legal responsibility is about $1-2M in pay right there.

The CEO also plays a critical role (with the CFO) in finalizing the earnings reports, with severe penalties for mistakes. They make strategic decisions that many employees aren't even aware of, that can have $billion+ repercussions for the company.

Taken all together, it's not completely surprising that a CEO of a trillion dollar company makes $10M/year (or receives stock of that value).

No, it's not truly meritocratic. I keep coming back to a lesson I was taught as a kid: life's not fair, but you can use your brain to make it a little less unfair.

lancesells• 3 years ago

How many other examples do you have? I've yet to see anyone or anything even close to legally accountable for their behavior. Corporations get caught doing things all the time, and the most I can see is a fine that is typically much smaller than the laws they broke.

There's no reason for the compensation between executives and workers to be so great. It's rigged and you can see it right here in this article.

themaninthedark2• 3 years ago

That is a risk, just like you are at risk of being arrested if circumvent emissions standards...

Oh right, only the engineers were charged in that one.

Also luckily for David, it was a 6 month suspended sentence. Meaning that he would have never had to serve any time that was overturned on appeal.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

Taken all together, it's not completely surprising that a CEO of a trillion dollar company makes $10M/year (or receives stock of that value).

I mean, sure. a trillion dollar company, 10m dollar salary, that's not even 1 hundredth of a percent of the company.

Apparently the Mozilla foundation is around 2 billion in revenue a year. But how is that worth 70% of the above salary (I won't count stocks, it makes sense that if a company makes more money, shareholders make more money)? $we're already well beyond retirement levels of funding in a few years and they double it in 2 years.

imgabe3• 3 years ago

More responsibility. CEOs will be responsible for decisions that could make or break the company. Regular employees generally don't have to worry that something they do might cause the entire company to go out of business and lose everyone's jobs. If the company screws up and causes a scandal of some sort, the rank and file employees are not going to be called to testify before Congress about what went wrong and have the entire media shitting on them for weeks afterwards.

The board of directors is willing to pay more for someone who will first, hopefully avoid such screw-ups and second, be able to deal with them if they happen.

wkat424215• 3 years ago

But these board members and CEOs rarely get to face real consequences. At worst a golden handshake that sets them up for their retirement.

zetazzed• 3 years ago

If your company makes $1bln per year now and pays a CEO $1 mln, and then someone comes along who has much better ideas, better work ethic, and more experience and you (the board) are convinced they can add 5% of revenue as pure profit to your company per year. They will add $50 mln in value per year. If that person asks $5 mln as compensation would it be responsible to say no?

Or to take a more concrete example, if Elon Musk decided to quit Tesla in a huff and focus entirely on X and stop dealing with the annoyance of public markets, the stock's would probably lose $75 bln in value overnight. If your legal goal is to maximize the company's value and it takes $500 mln pay per year to keep that from loss happening, it seems like it's probably a good deal to just pay the $500. As another example, Steve Jobs received hundreds of millions in stock options, and that was probably an excellent deal for Apple, though they probably could've hired someone cheaper.

I agree there are many cases where a more expensive CEO is actually worse. But I think it is very very easy to imagine cases where it makes a ton of sense to pay a large amount for an expensive CEO if they are the right person for the job and will add 10x more value than their pay.

ikt• 3 years ago

if Elon Musk

This isn't a fair comparison to most companies as Musk has made Tesla largely about him, can you think of many other companies where if the CEO left a 75 billion dollar stock drop would happen?

bad_username• 3 years ago

average worker actually responsible for creating value

CEOs actually are generally responsible for creating a lot of value, but most importantly, enabling a lot of value to be created by many others. When there is a causal link from you to a lot of created value, you tend to be paid proportionally well.

To believe that value is only actually created by average workers, and not the organizers of this work such as leaders or business owners, is quite short sighted. There are strong ideologies pushing this belief which I hope is not influencing your thought process.

Yes, there are bad CEOs out there, but they are not generally all bad.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

Yes, there are bad CEOs out there, but they are not generally all bad.

most of the Fortune 500 don't seem to have much good to talk about. Let alone what justifies 8 figure compensation.

I guess we'll never truly know, but it does make one wonder how much change it'd be for those to be run by CEOs for a tenth of the compensation (which mind you, is still 7 figures).

chillfox• 3 years ago

It seems perfectly meritocratic to me. I mean it’s consistent with how the word “meritocratic” is always used.

I have never seen a system that was actually based on skill or effort be described as meritocratic. Likewise I have never seen a system described as meritocratic that was actually based on skill or effort.

The way meritocratic is usually used is to describe systems that could appear to be based on skill or effort at the surface, but is not actually if you look just a little deeper.

smugma• 3 years ago

Here’s a different way to think about it. Each level up makes 25-50% above the level below it. Maybe at director or VP the jump is a bit bigger.

If senior engineers in the valley are making $500K TC, directors might clear $1M and VP’s $2M.

Above that it goes bonkers where you’ll see an SVP make $10M and a CEO $20M+.

Why do senior engineers make $500K? Well, they may be 2-5X more efficient than a junior, or you can look at how much value they are bringing in to the company.

edpichler• 3 years ago

Basically, more responsibility = more money.

ta_93905• 3 years ago

Supply:Demand ratio, like anything else.

npteljes3• 3 years ago

CEO pay is similar to other payments, where everyone is trying to claw themselves as much as they can, to certain personal limits. Powerful roles attract people who want power, and so, the higher up you go in a hierarchy, the more "dark"[0] traits you find, which equates to lessening personal limits to power / money gain. If you think of the ability, willingness and perseverance of one to further one's personal power as merit, then this is a meritocracy after all.

With regards to accepting that, culture plays a big role. Governments effectively groom people into accepting the status quo, some stronger than others. They build on features of the human psyche that otherwise support this too, for example, in many cultures it's taboo to question elders, and also, many cultures observe different classes of people, where the different classes wield different levels of power by default. If you're interested in the psychology of this, I would suggest to look into how societies are organized over the recorded history of humankind.

The charisma and image of the well-off leaders also plays a part in making people accept, and support their advantage. This is also something that people are much cleverer about than in the past - the art that is currently called public relations. The idea here is that whatever people perceive, must make sense in their mind, somehow. If it makes sense, then it's accepted much easier, and if it doesn't, it's bothersome and makes people think about a story where it makes sense after all. So, one aspect of public relations is and making certain things observable, others obscured, and crafting a narrative about the observable things. This game is "history written by victors", but a bit backwards - whoever sells the most compelling narrative, comes out as the victor.

At the end of the day, the question is "what are you going to do about it?". Certain things just are because we're not doing anything about it. Doing about it is a ton of effort, might not be possible, might not worth it at all because the effort outweighs the results, might not worth it because the side effects are greater than the potential gains. Or maybe people care about other things. And because all of these concerns exist in all humans, those in power can exploit these too, in order to keep or further their power.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stratification

daeros2• 3 years ago

I use Firefox and I have 0 intention of going back to chrome at all, I have adopted a strategy of Firefox by default with chrome as mere backup for what Firefox won't run.

The way I understand it they upset the free speech abolutist, but to be honest I don't really care, I like the roadmap and what the devs have been doing to firefox lately, I also don't mind being in the minority. I like it here, i'm not one of the ones that's going to switch browsers unless some major shoe drops that slows firefox to a crawl.

throwawaaarrgh• 3 years ago

Let them burn their cash, who cares? None of us is paying them. They're never going to die, their true masters will just keep them afloat so nobody can cry monopoly. It's not an accident that most of their money comes from their biggest competitor.

cvalka• 3 years ago

What would you do if you were her? I'd deprecate firefox.

renewiltord3• 3 years ago

Guys. Mozilla set out to make the web standards compliant. Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant.

Massive success to the org. Right after the rebranding from Phoenix, things took off. Super BD effort to get standardization going. Huge community management effort to get all sorts of random people installing Firefox everywhere.

This is the biggest success story ever. And this is why everyone has to always be growing. It's not enough to do what you set out to do. You have to always grow. If you're a for-profit corp this is your partners or shareholders who care. If you're a non-profit it's the general public.

But whoever that person is, the moment you stop growing you're in trouble. Oh they'll say "unchecked growth is cancer" and so on but what they want is to say that while nonetheless you grow.

Growth is survival. Even reaching your objective (as a non-profit) is death.

themaninthedark2• 3 years ago

Someone else posted that they lost 95% of their market share in the last 15 years, that is quite literally the opposite of unchecked growth.

Honestly, it seems like the problem is that the engineers let the business people in.

renewiltord3• 3 years ago

It was only ever successful because of business people.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

Firefox was the tool they used. They won. It's done. The web is universally standards compliant.

sure, when there's only 2 standards (down from 3 10 years ago. Probably down from 5 20 years ago), it's very easy to be compliant to the standards of 2.

But yeah, sad reality. What I want isn't necessarily what is most profitable. I'm tired of having to care about how much money my tools make to justify/chastise their ability to function.

terminous2• 3 years ago

For all the valid criticism of the Wikipedia Foundation, their combined salaries of all "officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" (aka board and C suite) was $4.2 million in 2021

Page 12 of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

g-b-r5• 3 years ago

Yeah they just have some problem with handling the donations...

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/search?q=endowment&pa...

SXX• 3 years ago

This is because Jimmy Wales is still around and even though he dont control wikimedia directly he is actually a public figure with massive recognition and authority. And certainly have more following and trust than majority of FAANG CEOs.

Unfortunately Mozilla never had benevolent dictator to begin with and now there is not a single person who can call the bullshit loud enough.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

Honestly I don't care what Google, I mean Mozilla, does with their money. I gave up on caring about Firefox a long time ago.

LAC-Tech• 3 years ago

For younger readers - Mozilla is the company in charge of a web browser called Firefox, which was widely used from around 2004-2014.

reducesuffering4• 3 years ago

Everyone that advocated for ousting technical Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich bears responsibility.

Here's many of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198

We are where we are today because of people on this very forum. Especially ironic when it's the more lefty types that have helped kill the non-profit open source browser and many are themselves solely using the for-profit Chrome ran by a capitalistic advertising panopticon. Great job, much appreciated /s

wkat424215• 3 years ago

Uhhh no, sorry. Getting Eich to leave was one thing. Getting a completely incompetent replacement hired is not on those people.

Unless Eich was the one and only possible savior of Mozilla (as Steve Jobs arguably was to 1999's Apple - it does happen), these are two very different things.

You don't fold your principles just because you risk rocking the boat. And Mozilla is a pretty progressive organisation. You can't have a figurehead that isn't aligned with that.

reducesuffering4• 3 years ago

This is the timeline we're on. Ousting Eich directly led to our current Mozilla situation. He's not the only who could've ran it successfully. But we are where we are because people wanted him ousted and instead were ok with Mitchell Baker types. From a realist perspective that cares about actual outcomes, we are in the worse timeline with an incompetent Mozilla vs. whatever small negative affects Eich would affect in the grand scheme of Prop 8 related issues.

BrendanEich5• 3 years ago

I'm a co-founder of mozilla.org (unlike Mitchell Baker).

You projecting your own or others' politics onto it raises an acute historical question: if I'm a co-founder but not "progressive", yet I was not driven out at founding or for 16+ years, then what changed, when?

No "society" cop-out answers. Mozilla was a global project from early days and we made it a point not to litmus-test politics or religion as conditions for taking on any role, while we were growing.

I have my own answers, but I'm interested in yours.

mardifoufs3• 3 years ago

Regardless of what happened with him, there's literally no reason to believe that he wouldn't have had the same massive salary if he was still the CEO. Him being technical has nothing to do with taking a massive salary or not, the issue is cultural. Especially when you see the exact same thought process all over this thread, of thinking "But they are a CEO in tech! They deserve it!" instead of keeping in mind the completely different dynamics that apply to non profits. I don't think it has much to do with the CEO themselves

reducesuffering4• 3 years ago

The CEO's "massive salary" isn't the issue. It's the "revenue declining" part. No one would care much about a salary like this for Baker or Eich is Mozilla was actually flourishing. But it certainly is not.

While Firefox market share and revenue is declining, Eich was able to a 200 person browser company from the ground up (based on Chromium). Huge difference between CEO caliber here.

I think we'd all be better off if those efforts would've been combined to making a strong 3rd browser contender, instead of Chrome, Safari, and the peanuts sprinkled across Firefox and Brave separately.

g-b-r5• 3 years ago

“This requires rich data” :facepalm:

dang2• 3 years ago

Recent and related:

Mozilla is two different entities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819284 - Dec 2023 (25 comments)

Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308 - Dec 2023 (331 comments)

ta_93905• 3 years ago

Most tech startups spend years and sometimes decades in net losses while CEO get raises because revenue isn't the one and only performance and potential indicator.

I cannot find any benefit of the articles bashing Mozilla with hot claims - that aren't necessarily false but used in misleading contexts - other than Google, Microsoft and Apple.

I have used firefox for years because I believe in FOSS and privacy despite the shrinking market share and the poor addons market.

I am not going to leave Firefox after the recent and significant improvments in the weakness points for some conspiracy theories based on completely normal facts

Brian_K_White2• 3 years ago

Using and advocating the use of Firefox, and objecting to this Mozilla leadership situation are two different things.

Of course we still have to use and prefer and advocate FF because there is no other serious option.

And this leadership problem is a real problem.

mardifoufs3• 3 years ago

Well that's the thing. Mozilla is not a private for profit corporation, the money isn't from investors, and the goal isn't to make a profit at the end of the day. Non profit CEOs always have a much smaller salary, and much smaller increases. That's just how it usually works because the money they have is supposed to go into fulfilling their objective, not make people rich. Why does Mozilla get a pass for this? It's so weird to see this defensiveness whenever the subject is brought up, because you can clearly like and support Mozilla and still disagree with a non profit paying 1% of what it earns to an underperforming ceo. That sum would be weird even if Mozilla was doing well.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

I'm just using it because the alternative is even more hostile towards me. I don't care about the drama, I just want to use an adblocker on all my browsers' devices.

That said, FF mobile is still far from parity with its old version from 3 years ago when it did its big break, so it becomes hard to sympathize when a CEO salary doubles and I'm arguably getting a worse experience despite that.

poisonborz• 3 years ago

We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating... This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction

This is a debiliating disease of the software industry. People need software mostly as predictable tools, not some mystery magic entity that shapeshifts with each new profit incentive. To make it better, you can just ask them.

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

Executive pay is the cancer of modern times. It's like paying only the conductor for the entire orchestra.

dcchambers• 3 years ago

All good things must come to an end...maybe it's just time that we accept that Mozilla is not an exception to the rule.

I firmly believe we need a strong nonprofit guiding standards and leading innovation in cross-platform technology, but is Mozilla still filling those shoes?

What truly innovative things have Mozilla done lately? They have been playing catch-up/follow-the-leader with various consumer-focused things like federated social networks, VPNs, VR, etc. Firefox is treading water but still slowly sinking every year. Firefox is great browser - it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing" - it's cultural/hype/marketing/something else entirely. Bugzilla hasn't had a major release in 5+ years and has lost the battle of bug tracking to things like GitHub Issues. Thunderbird is back in active development and has had good improvements but has a very niche market. There's Rust, but Rust has it's own foundation now and extends far beyond Mozilla.

The MDN web docs are great, but wasn't that one of the teams hit hardest by "COVID Layoffs" in 2020?

Nextgrid12• 3 years ago

it's not a technical reason why Mozilla is "losing"

I think it is - Firefox no longer has any selling points now that the competition has not only caught up but overtaken it. There are easy features they can add to make the browser appealing out-of-the-box to non-technical users but those would require courage and taking on some actual risk.

Every other product is useless - we don't need yet another VPN, or yet another password manager. Both those markets are already saturated by both shitty and good products, there is nothing Mozilla can bring to the table.

With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise

Related Stories