[adventured]

The average NBA player salary is $6 million per year.

In the next few years all of the NBA players combined (~420 players) are set to make more in salary than all the S&P 500 CEOs earn in salary combined.

Should top executives at $10 billion companies (7x the average value of an NBA team) receive compensation on par with professional athletes? How does that not make sense?

The US will spend $10 billion per year compensating several thousand athletes. How much should be spent compensating the people directly responsible for operating businesses that represent trillions of dollars in GDP and tens of millions of employees?

Mediocre middle relief baseball pitchers should make $8 million per year, but execs running billion dollar companies shouldn't? You can argue that baseball players are overpaid, but that's an absurd premise. It's directly representative of the value in the system - tens of trillions in wealth in the stock market, and vast profit generation - and the price of acquiring talent.

[drieddust]

Executive compensation and performance is negatively correlated.

NBA stars make money by exposing themselves to downside. They have fan, they generate direct revenue and last but not the least they have their skin in the game. One injury and their playing career is over for good. What does these executives bring to table? Can 10 of them alone deliver the product and services to customer?

And when they fail ,they simply take large severance and fade away to a beach only to come back fully rejuvenated to fuck again.

[FireBeyond]

How many of those $10B companies are actually really worth that, not just an inflated result of funding rounds.

The 420 or so players in the NBA can largely be considered to be the best 420 players in the world.

NBA teams also have a pretty high revenue to value ratio.

Points to you too for ignoring that in many cases the salary of a Fortune 500 CEO is, in many to most cases a much smaller fraction of their compensation packages. In many cases bonuses and other compensation is between 3 and 10 or more times the salary, so not exactly equitable, though it makes for a better sound bite.

[cbr]

    How many of those $10B companies are actually really
    worth that, not just an inflated result of funding
    rounds?

The parent is talking about S&P 500 companies, which means publicly traded ones. The thing where private companies have inflated valuations [1][2] doesn't apply here.

[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/terms

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455

[kalleboo]

NBA player salaries are also not sustainable, they're going to have to drop once ESPN will only be able to charge people who actually watch sports instead of getting paid per cable subscriber regardless.