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Sundar Pichai's total comp is like $220 million but $2 million of that is in salary and the rest is in stock. I agree that capital gains should be taxed more -

• gottorf 3y ago
  Capital gains are taxed like ordinary income, except long-term capital gains, which have lower rates because we as a society decided that it's overall beneficial to encourage investment into productive capacity. You could argue that maybe that's wrong, but plenty of thought did go into it through the legislative process. > income (work) is taxed higher than money sitting in accounts, doing nothing It's not money just sitting in accounts. It's just the paper value of the stock that Pichai or whoever owns, which ultimately is a fractional share of Google the company, which presumably is engaging in productive enterprise[0]. And stock grants are taxed; you definitely can't dodge the tax man that easily. [0]: Now, you could definitely argue that the value that Google provides to the world is less than what its market capitalization would indicate, and I certainly have a sympathetic view to that. But it's individual market participants that decide what that value is.