Agreed. The article poorly draws comparisons with 10x engineers and executives. This VP level compensation in Twitter would be a (junior) director level package

Agreed. The article poorly draws comparisons with 10x engineers and executives. This VP level compensation in Twitter would be a (junior) director level package in most large corporates. The bonus is slightly more generous (I think most would see $50k), but not out of whack. As an SVP as SFDC he would have had a much larger base salary, and probably damn good options. His Twitter stock grant is probably worth a lot more, but it was also riskier. Now $150k + $250k RSUs (probably on a 5+ yr schedule) for a new PhD is a lot. I assume they were working on something that Google figured could save them an order of magnitude more than that a year. (Of course the debate is, couldn't a similarly motivated, if not fiscally so, existing staff developer make the same savings? Probably yes.)