Originally Posted by
Tchiowa
It's got nothing to do with how "hard" his job is. It has to do with the impact on the company from the job. A good CEO can add millions upon millions a year to the value of his company.
And yet the research literature shows that they rarely do. In fact, CEO pay/company performance is inversely correlated.
My personal favorite example is Dave O'Reilly at Chevron. He engineered the 2 big mergers (Texaco and Unocal), he got Chevron into Kazakhstan and the SSRs, he added literally billions of dollars to Chevron's net worth. A guy like that is easily worth 10s of millions or more annually as a CEO. There are lots of examples like that.
And far, far more where it simply doesn't happen.