A for profit company can simply be the vehicle required to take investments that the non profit was forbidden. I doubt the non-profit parent company board ever intended the sub to be a runaway profit maker and anyone going to work for a sub of a non-profit would probably be aware that the potential there was capped compared to traditional for profit corps.
I say this as someone with 20 years of Mozilla employment, the first couple in the non profit Mozilla Foundation and then about 18 years in the taxable subsidiary. The sub is technically taxable, so "for profit" but it was never created to make people rich, but rather to allow Mozilla to reap some profits and grow it size and influence, which it did, reaching about 30% browser market share.
The structures were similar but likely different in material ways, as there was zero equity at MoCo, nevertheless, if you go to work for an arm of a non-profit, expecting to get rich, you're probably not reading the fine print carefully enough.
> anyone going to work for a sub of a non-profit would probably be aware that the potential there was capped compared to traditional for profit corps
I think this is where this all went off the rails. It's very clear that a huge percentage of the staff (I think the last numbers I saw was that over 85% of the staff had signed the letter urging the board to resign) were hired with incredibly big compensation packages, predicated on the giant equity valuation. It is not surprising that those people did not turn out to be there due to being big believers in the mission of the non-profit, or that they expected those compensation packages to be real.
