> why does one person receive more than the hundreds or thousands of people that do the actual work? Because of several things. One is supply and demand. Thos

> why does one person receive more than the hundreds or thousands of people that do the actual work? Because of several things. One is supply and demand. Those hundreds of thousands of people doing "the actual work" are quite often quite interchangeable. High supply means low pay. There's no exploitation going on. The other is the impact of the individual's actions. If you are a boss in a position to say "we keep making combustion engines" vs one that says "we go all in on electric vehicles", that decision can make or break a company. CEOs make hundreds of such decisions in a year. If you are an engineer in a position to fix ten bugs per week, and add five features, well, you can hope you'll be in a more impactful position one day. Until then, CEOs will make much more money than you. Finally, it's the asymmetry of the impact. The more impactful you can be, the more damage you can do too. I once talked (online) with a chess player who told me that at his best he can be as good as Kasparov, but Kasparov was consistent, while he was not. People at Kasparov's level make few mistakes. Very few. At some level in a company's hierarchy it's very important that you do few mistakes. More important than how many brilliant decisions you make. And there are precious few people who have the attention to detail and focus to get to be a Kasparov-like for the corporate world. Those people get paid.