Another way to think about this is how much the CEO is actually taking vs others. If the Aptiv CEO worked for free, giving his $15 million pear year to the 147

Another way to think about this is how much the CEO is actually taking vs others. If the Aptiv CEO worked for free, giving his $15 million pear year to the 147k employees that would only be $100/year per employee. Meaningless. Aptiv spends $1 billion per year on salaries. So the very "worst CEO" (by this metric) receives 1.40% of all salary paid by the company. Google's CEO receives is 1%. I think this explains why CEOs make so much relative to an individual. Paying them 1% of all salaries feels, and is, very cheap given how important their role is. If Steve Jobs had been paid 50% of all salary it would have been worth it to shareholders. Of course lots of bad CEOs get paid huge amounts as well but why is this bad? The salary they received is not what hurts the company, it only cost around 1%. What really hurts is the damage a bad CEO does to the company. That can cost the entire resources of the company.