8 ms·

(Replying to a trollish comment, but don't want to push it to the top). There was a comment about the salary that CEO Sal Khan takes, with is over $800,0000 per

• noja 7y ago
  because....?
• amachefe 7y ago
  Are you not the one trolling? So will the figure be less of it's he is doing the same work for a company?
  • wanda 7y ago
    Why run KA as a non-profit at all then? If you run something for the common good, you extract whatever you need to live and to run the thing — not $800k. At least, that's what I would do if I ran a non-profit, I would take only the money I need to live/perform my duties in the upkeep of the service. Which would not be anywhere near $800k.
    • agustif 7y ago
      Well, sadly NGO are just financial investment types for people like that, they see they can get away with no IRS and donations and go for it...
  • dmayle 7y ago
    Jimmy Wales takes $0. I know they're not in the same situation, but even half that salary provides an extravagant lifestyle. I don't think he should be poor, I just think that if he's asking people to give up their money to pay him to do what he's doing, than he should be more frugal with the money he's asking for
    • WanderPanda 7y ago
      He may ask for the money, you may consider his salary and decide not to donate and everybody goes his way. The comments here smell like there is a lot of acute jealousy floating around...
      • ipsum2 7y ago
        I don't think its jealousy. Millions of people became unemployed in the last 2-3 weeks, so it feels disingenuous to ask for money when he's making $800k when people are living off their savings. It might be better to donate to a local school, food bank, or neighbors who are having a hard time instead.
        • KMnO4 7y ago
          Khan Academy is the “local school” right now. Many classrooms are completely unprepared for remote teaching, and Khan Academy is providing relief to the millions of students and teachers having a hard time.
        • ckdarby 7y ago
          Reread what you replied to,the same still applies. It isn't like Khan is some religious cult and those unemployed people think they're now going to "hell" if they don't donate. Unemployed individuals will make a decision to donate or not. There are also millions who are not unemployed and are WFH making good money, FAANG.
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• kharak 7y ago
  Yes, truly terrible that non-profit organisations serving the common good should provide high salaries. Founder and employees should just go into banking, because those guys absolutely deserve their high pay. Imagine, just imagine a society, where doing non-profit could be a valid career option without a disadvantage in the income department. The horror.
  • dmayle 7y ago
    It's not about paying a salary. I've worked in non-profits before, all of the employees themselves are taking pay cuts to work for the greater good. He's asking people to give up their money in order to provide this service. A salary half that size provides an extravagant lifestyle, what he's taking is exorbitant.
    • kharak 7y ago
      What CEO's and many other people in for-profit industries are getting, is also quit exorbitant. But that's generally accepted. Why do some people go nuts if they see non-profits demanding high pay? Khan Academy has done something unique, helpful and truly excellent, but how dare Salman Khan wanting a cut similar to for-profits. (If it is similar, properly still less).
      • mikekchar 7y ago
        I think the key here is that most people equate "non-profit" with "charity". The idea is that as much money as possible is used to fund the services provided by the entity. However, there are many businesses run as non-profit entities that are not in it to provide a charity. It's just that the entity of the company is designed to take no profit. Often these entities invest heavily into growth as opposed to taking profit (and often this is even the stated goal of the organization). If you take donations, it sounds like you should be a charity, but there are lots of examples of organizations that rely on donations, but are not charities. Basically anybody living off Patreon, for example. Having said that, I don't think it is wrong for a donator to decide that they don't want to donate because one person is taking the lion's share of the wealth. In fact, there are for profit organisations that I will avoid simply because they don't seem to provide a service other than to line some fat cat executives' pockets. People are free to choose how they want to spend their money.
• monkin 7y ago
  > I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations. You know, that Stallman lived for years out of donations? And no one was opposite of that. It also worked for WikiMedia etc. It's great business model but people need to stop looking on non-profits like that next corporation. They require far more work and I think leaders of such projects should be compensated well. :)
  • luckylion 7y ago
    To be fair, there's a difference between getting a salary from donations and getting 40x the average income from donations.
    • red2awn 7y ago
      But the value he provides to the world is (in my opinion) more than 40x the average person.
    • mikekchar 7y ago
      To be even more fair, RMS received hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes (MacArthur and Takeda awards just to name 2) for the work he did and as far as I can tell he plowed it all back into the FSF. I couldn't quite figure out what he was paid for his work at the FSF, but I'd be fairly surprised if it was substantially more than what he donated himself.
• cameronbrown 7y ago
  Absolutely not. If you don't pay the best, you'll get lower quality teachers and developers.
  • srazzaque 7y ago
    There's something to this. Maybe you won't get the most altruistic people, but you'll absolutely get a higher quality cut of the workforce. I've heard that the Singaporean government has a similar philosophy. Their prime minister is one of the (if not, the) highest paid PM in the world at circa SGD $2m/year.
    • cosmodisk 7y ago
      Looking purely at the stats,I'd say they deserve it.Also,the PM and the cabinet had substantial cuts to their salaries some years ago,which was initiated by the PM himself.
• animalnewbie 7y ago
  He was a hotshot stock broker who would be making 10 times that. 0.8m isbarely respectful for him.
  • onei 7y ago
    To me that speaks more about the wage disparity between normal folks and those working on Wall Street, etc. No one needs that much money, and someone willing to take such a pay cut yet still be well above the average only exposes that truth.
    • lotsofpulp 7y ago
      It’s not a mystery that “normal folks’” work output doesn’t scale and is limited by time, whereas tech/math/science related work output scales with almost no marginal costs so it’s worth much more money per hour of labor.
    • sumedh 7y ago
      > No one needs that much money What if you want to buy more business/investments or fund startups?
• elamje 7y ago
  The year is 2050, Khan Academy has raised 2 billion in funding, restructured as a for-profit corporation, and has vendor lock-in with nearly every school and child in the world. Khan academy charges a minimum of $800/yr/student. The CEO takes home $56 million a year. Which do you prefer, 800k, or 50 mil? Do we really want to a world where a brilliant mind, Sal Khan, is not rewarded at all for leaving his hedge fund career to make YouTube videos for next to nothing for many months, if not years? On top of that, he likely had a very real opportunity to turn Khan academy into a huge company, but instead went the non hockey stick, nonprofit route. Being a part of a successful non profit doesn’t mean you need to dip into your employees and your own salary to pay bills. Some of this might just be publicity to show that Khan academy is growing rapidly with remote learning.
  • kiba 7y ago
    This whole startup scenario is likely to end badly for Khan Academy, or that the drive for money at all cost is killing Khan Academy's value as an education platform.
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• vowelless 7y ago
  I think he is being underpaid by at least a multiple. I wish we valued teachers like him more. He should be making athlete level money. I support Math for America that provides stipends to smart teachers. It has the same premise: good teachers are rare and it’s good for everyone if they stay in education instead of being lured to Google or Goldman Sachs. https://www.mathforamerica.org/ https://www.mathforamerica.org/
  • jessaustin 7y ago
    ...good teachers are rare and it’s good for everyone if they stay in education instead of being lured to Google or Goldman Sachs. Is this a common Goldman pipeline? Do they have recruiters hanging around teachers' lounges? The teachers I know who have gotten fed up with all of it have become insurance agents, agricultural extension people, etc. b^)
    • barry-cotter 7y ago
      https://www.thecrimson.com/column/plain-truth/article/2020/3/10/yang-teach-for-america-and-goldman-sachs/ https://www.thecrimson.com/column/plain-truth/article/2020/3... > After your stint at Teach for America, a two-year post-undergraduate teaching program, you decided to leave the academic world behind and work in New York City. Where are you most likely to be employed? Goldman Sachs.
      • jessaustin 7y ago
        Offered without comment, I'm not sure what this link to an opinion column is supposed to mean. The quote is a hypothetical example. It seems that T4A is more of a temporary diversion program than a recruitment program anyway. Harvard students, who in a just universe would all become wealthy investment bankers, are encouraged to teach in urban schools for a couple of years. This despite the fact that their Economics and Philosophy concentration probably included very little on pedagogy. This despite the nearly universal (although not necessarily justified) opinion among teachers and administrators that first-year teachers are pretty much useless. This despite the writer's apparent suggestion that the point of the whole thing should be an easier "in" to Goldman.
• tadzik_ 7y ago
  From what I gathered, while his salary is 800,000, the costs of IT are about 5M. With 250% of the regular load, while it probably won't go up to 12.5M, the costs likely increase by so much than his salary is still pretty much insignificant. From the other perspective: they provide, apparently, an invaluable service. While the entire world struggles with keeping the education going, people apparently need Khan Academy 2.5 times as much as they did before. And you think the CEO now deserves less pay than he gets, at the time when we need him more than we ever did before?
• maps7 7y ago
  Do you have a source? I will absolutely not donate if he's making that much. He should sacrifice his entire salary until this is over. I encourage others not to donate too.
• dsparkman 7y ago
  Yeah, it may seem high, but at the same time a lot of the content is still content he created. In that context, I think the number is reasonable. We use it as a huge part of the our home schooling at the house.
• DevX101 7y ago
  Khan Academy's budget is the same as a large high school but has the impact at least 500x. Him making 4x a principal's salary I have absolutely no problem with. His opportunity cost is also very high. Salman Khan could get a job tomorrow making millions in annual comp.
• buu700 7y ago
  Adding my 2c: his salary has nothing to do with "fairness" or an arbitrary upper limit on non-profit compensation, but a negotiation based on supply and demand. For the sake, of argument, let's take it as a given that 1) he could easily earn the same amount or more somewhere else, and 2) if offered $1 less than $800k, he would walk. The question then becomes whether the organization could replace his value for the same or less money. i.e. could they hire someone else for $800k, much less a more "appropriate" salary, who would run things as effectively? Maybe; I don't know enough to say. I might consider doing some research and putting more thought into the question before donating, but it doesn't seem out of the question for me that keeping on both the founder and someone with his level of experience would be worth that much or more.
  • wegs 7y ago
    If Khan Academy did the same thing without Khan, I think it would work better, rather than worse. The personality-cult model is less scalable than the best-and-brightest model.
    • buu700 7y ago
      I could see that, but I could also see Khan having unique value in terms of marketing, relationships, vision, and tribal knowledge.
• deleted 7y ago
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• grumple 7y ago
  He deserves every penny and more. He’s brought so much knowledge to the world. For reference, there are many developers making more than that in SV, and they don’t run their organizations.
• decasteve 7y ago
  Do you treat other organizations the same? Neflix pays Reed Hastings 10s of millions. Does that stop you from subscribing? I still think "donating" is appropriate regardless of what they pay their executives. Just don't treat it as an altruistic charity. Think of the donation as a pay-what-you-can/want for the service. If you have the means, pay $10 per month and treat it like a subscription while you're using the service.
• Upvoter33 7y ago
  Looks like most people here think the salary is reasonable. I'd be curious to see the reaction if he were making 8m / year instead of 800k. At what point would it seem like "too much"?
• abdulmuhaimin 7y ago
  you make it seem like receiving $1mil salary and donating 100k as much more "noble" and worthy of donation request. Mind you, even $1mil a year is miniscule compare to what he managed to achieve with the company. So thats already a lot donation that you cant see
• capitalist_here 7y ago
  Think about this: Khan Academy is asking for increased donations right now because of their success. Any other for-profit company in their predicament is benefiting very naturally from revenues increasing with higher demand for their product. That is not true for a non profit structured at aiming to provide a free service. Should a ceo reduce his income because his company is succeeding? The unfortunate element here is that their fundraising does not scale (or scale well enough) as a function of additional reach.