If paying a CEO $200k more makes the charity $2 million more, it’s a no-brainer. Billionaires love to give to animal-related causes, so that’s easily plausible.

In reality of course, predicting the amounts of money a CEO will bring in, so it becomes a nepo-baby-fest like everything else. People with rich connections are in high demand at pretty much every entity that has a need to raise money, so they cost a lot.

Then of course you have the problem that in the wider scope, this reality creates an arms-race between charities for fundraising potential that diverts from the causes themselves. The only real solution to that problem is to punish charities that pay their officers too much by not giving them money.