Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy made so much money that he poured it into funding some amazing writing (while the standard joke was “I read Playboy for the articles,” the articles were generally quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant work in printing and typographic technology (one example: the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type on the gravure pages didn’t match the type on the offset pages, they had a custom version of Palatino made to correct the discrepancy).

Those three are still the top tier, at least when it comes to money for short fiction, although it’s depressing to read stuff from the 30s which has dollar amounts attached to publications and realize that even in nominal dollars, those would be better paychecks than most writers receive today.