Yeah its really not that high. I was reading the Ian Goodfellow, creator of GANs, was only making 800k at google. Which is honestly, really low for someone who has done ground breaking research in neural networks.
Yeah that’s pretty insulting, honestly. Black or Sholes were making >10m as thought leaders in banks. It’s surprising to me that finance is so passe as a career despite the fact, as Matt Levine said, “they are run as employee run co-ops.” In otherwords, big big money. Entry level analysts at my old firm were making over 250k total comp.
Scholes & Merton also joined a hedge fund that traded based on their models and cased a financial crash after the Russian bond default in 1998 which their models didn't take into account. Great example of a black swan event.