[tsotha]

You'd think shareholders would object to this, but major shareholders in public listed companies tend to be entities such as pension funds who in turn have CEOs (you get the picture)

I think it's more that the amount a CEO makes is insignificant compared to the company's other costs. Supposedly GE has 304,000 employees worldwide. If the shareholders decided to pay the CEO $10m less they could afford to give every other employee an extra $0.63 a week. Whoopie.

And yet the CEO can mean billions of dollars made or lost depending on the quality of his decision making. As a shareholder if you think you're actually getting your money's worth you're not going to quibble over ten or twenty million for the chief executive when the company's market cap is over a hundred billion dollars.

Do the shareholders get their money's worth? I don't think there's any possibility you could answer this question objectively.