I think the issue is that there is no notion of downside risk. No claw back. A high responsibility position with, apparently, no responsibility. This kind of t

I think the issue is that there is no notion of downside risk. No claw back. A high responsibility position with, apparently, no responsibility. This kind of thing, as an investor, is utterly maddening (ex-investor, I am glad I don't have to meet these people anymore). Pay for performance is no issue, the issue is that there is no performance. If you want the big job, you take the big risks...this is capitalism without failure (what is most maddening is that these people often see themselves as arch-capitalists...they are not, they are socialists milking the principal-agent problem to death). Most CEOs are vastly overpaid. For scale, I would guess that the number of truly effective CEOs since WW2 is under 100 (I have only came across a handful). Today's CEOs are not type-A, successful geniuses...the majority will fail (the return on the average listed stock is negative), they will fail for basic/preventable reasons. As a public investor, your hope is that you just have a CEO who is dumb/ineffective...the ones who are smart are usually devious too and will do real damage. I have no idea where we go from here but it is important to recognise that this isn't capitalism and this isn't sustainable. Public company boards are a big problem (again, nothing at risk) but there is also a deep incompetence...sometimes this is just not understanding what a company is there for (i.e. can be fixed by training), sometimes this is more about failures of personality/morality (i.e. we are actively picking bad people). But yeah, this is a big issue: workers hate it, shareholders hate it, and nothing we have done so far has solved this (unsurprisingly, all the executive pay and linking to company performance is utter shit...I see this backfire more than it works i.e. a no-nothing director who was CEO somewhere else and ran the company into the ground sets targets which are either the wrong variable, too hard, or too easy...it never works). The risk from overpaying for a CEO is far larger than the risk from underpaying one (in fact, overpaying suggests that you have no idea what these people are actually worth and don't know what you are doing). It is totally reasonable to look at someone getting paid $60m (regardless of the circumstance) for failure, and going..."this doesn't make sense". If you get paid this much, you take the big risk. There has to be responsibility.