Originally Posted by
eponymous_coward
So are CEOs tens of times better than the ones we had in the 1950s, given that CEO pay is more than 10 times as much as it was in the 1950s? Or could it be that CEOs set each others salaries thanks to being on each others boards- "I'll scratch yours, you scratch mine"?
I think that the job is 10s of times harder, particularly with big companies. I'm not sure how many are actually good at it -- there are definitely a lot of bad CEOs.
All the talk of CEOs being overpaid is great press but it's not actually a real problem. For a seriously large company, the CEO salary is completely irrelevant to their bottom line. The difference between a single good or bad decision per year could easily save / make / cost the company much more more than the salary. It doesn't make a lot of sense to fret over how many millions you pay someone when their decisions can be responsible for swings in the billions.