"In fact", yes. But does Element still have an outsized influence over the foundation? Just last month the foundation posted a bit of a defensive blog about how "open source" they are to clear the air, but as far as I can tell, it appears that a majority of the foundation "Spec Core Team" are Element employees. I can't strongly back that up since the page that lists the members doesn't say who they're employed by, so I'm guessing based on what their linked GitHub profiles show.
from memory andrew & uhoreg all joined the team before later applying for jobs at Element - the fact being that if you wanted to be paid to work on Matrix back then, Element was pretty much the only place to do so (being the company formed by the team who created Matrix). I’m not going to fire people from Element or kick them off the SCT and lose their braintrust though.
