I disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.
Nonsense, there have been multiple cases in the west, e.g. John Chambers at Cisco, Michael Kneeland at United Rentals, Dan Price at Gravity Payments, Nicholas Woodman at GoPro.
Maybe it's like when a store has 20% off sale a couple weeks after they raised their prices 10%. Yeah, it's still a sale, it's just not as big of a price cut as you're making it out to be.
Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.
It would be interesting to see if the CEO bailed if her pay was cut in half. Many CEOs are not in a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. So they can walk away if you cut their pay without looking like an asshole. Then the board is stuck looking for a replacement who will accept 1.25M and the expectation that it could get cut again if the company doesn't turn around.