it's not quite that simple. if an employee makes 100k a year in salary, they cost much more than that to the company - the company has to pay for payroll taxes, health insurance, any benefits like PTO or free food, not to mention all the infrastructure the employee uses like the office building, electricity, air conditioning, etc. according to a comment above, airbnb has 14,000 employees. that's a lot of office space and benefits to be paying for. and that's just the employee costs, not counting anything else