It is tragic that a board member would say something as ignorant as that. He could be educating those people on how to fund open source software development instead of complaining about the inability to fund centralized development.
The people that want to give millions of dollars toward development don't have to give it to the Foundation. In fact, it would be better if they didn't. The best scenario would be for them to use those millions to fund independent development. Unfortunately, Pierce's ignorance appears to be widespread in the financial industry where centralization is all that is understood.