Linus is not getting stock options from the Linux Foundation, so the cash pay must compensate for that. Senior VP's at Google earned little over $600,000, but

Linus is not getting stock options from the Linux Foundation, so the cash pay must compensate for that. Senior VP's at Google earned little over $600,000, but their total compensation was over $50 million in 2020. Linus is giving up extra zero to work for the foundation. (Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for Github. That business was born from a side project he quickly whipped up.)