This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives.

They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.

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hyperbovine 3 hours ago | parent [-]

1.6% is insane though. That would be like Google, Apple, or MSFT paying their CEO $4-6 billion a year.

	▲	glenstein 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	mschuster91 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is, the market price for executive leadership doesn't care about that, there is always a floor at the bottom that will make leadership compensation consume much more % of the budget of a smaller org than something the size of Google. Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.