> When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.

They also bought up a significant fraction of the Firefox core devs -- there's a lot of "crushing the competition" you can do when your money pit is basically bottomless.

Mozilla was a firehose of money back then. Financially they were and still are Google: literally they get a fraction of Google's own revenue stream. That was more than sufficient to reward their developers in whatever way they liked.

Those devs weren't leaving Mozilla because of money. They left because they were being given a nearly blank slate on which to create a browser they felt would be much better.