Do underperforming funds (or even losing) still profit off of management fees? (Longer post)

Melvin Capital was obviously a successful before the GME debacle, returning 30% on average from 2014 to 2020. Their assets in Q4 2020 were $23 billion. They obviously had a terrible 2021 and are off to a bad start in 2022. Naturally, despite some inflows, their AUM is down. But they still have $15+ billion AUM. 

Melvin, to my knowledge, has less than 50 employees.

And so I guess my question is, does a firm like this still profit wildly even in a year like 2021 when they lost $7 billion and collected no performance fees? At 2 and 20, they are collecting $300 million in management fees even in a down year. I don't think there is anyway it costs near that much to run 50 employee fund.

Regardless, their situation is unique, and their losing/underperformance just started last year. So I'll use another, more drawn-out example:

Greenlight Capital, run by David Einhorn, has underperformed the S&P 500 every year since 2014, losing money 4 of those 7 years. Their AUM has indeed dwindled from 7.5 billion to around to $2 billion during this period. But by looking at their 2015-2021 year-end AUM and conservatively assuming 1.5% management fee they still collected more than $500 million in management fees during this period. They are reported to have employed less than 50 people through those years and still today.

Again--I just don't see how it could have cost them anywhere this much to keep the lights on. 

Is this common? If so, it seems like once you have some success and reach a certain level of AUM, you could just continue to run a relatively lean operation, milk the management fee for a couple consecutive years even if you performed terribly, and retire.