Frankly if you’re a CTO you aren’t incentivized by a salary. It makes sense in this case no different than you’d code on the weekends for your side hustle.

It only doesn’t make sense when this jackass thinks the salaried engineer needs this “grit”.

C-levels aren’t supposed to be “model employees”. The incentive structure is wildly weighted in their favor. Instead you should ask them to understand the difference, which is asking a lot of these sociopaths, but I digress.