Also, having no work-life balance is different if you own a significant fraction of the company vs. if you’re on salary.

Like, if Jensen Huang spends 12 hours over the weekend working on something for nVidia and increases the share price by 0.01% (with a $4.165 trillion market cap, this means it goes up $416 million), his personal net worth will go up by $14.7m. Not bad for a little weekend work.

Let’s assume that someone who is on salary is on something absurd like $1m per year and gets a 500% bonus for working overtime. Their 12 hours of weekend work is going to net them $28k. That’s certainly nice, but it’s about 1/500th of what Huang gets. And, your average engineer probably doesn’t get overtime at all, and if they did it would be closer to $3k not $30k.

If someone who owns a business wants to have a bad work-life balance, that’s one thing. But, it should never be expected of anybody who’s just on salary.