What are your thoughts on NFL player Josh Allen having a $250MM contract? I fail to understand why there is more controversy over CEO pay than athletes.
If Sundar Pichai ever had to compete against other companies at the level of an NFL player, vs. be asleep at the wheel of Google’s money-printing advertising monopoly, he would immediately crumple. This is obvious in their fumbling all the AI stuff, half of which they invented.
I don't follow sports, but at least those people are doing actual, physically comparable things with clear connections to revenue (more like music artists than CEOs).
Maybe that analogy is more apt than you intended though, in that the valuations are made for shallow human/society reasons that are quite decoupled from reality.
That doesn't even include all the merchandise and the food/drink sales and all the other benefits that come from signing big name stars. The CEO of a company doesn't have the same "star" power a pro athlete, musician, or actor has.
Physicality is far more measurable in its results than the product of a thousands strong multi-national company.
In other words one can pretty clearly attribute the performance of an athlete to said athletes talents and ability. In the case of the CEO making the same money, it's much harder to measure their performance, and even harder to attribute the success of the company to their direct performance. This point becomes even more true as companies grow in scale, such as Google has done.
That doesn’t mean that their performance can’t significantly affect their companies stock price to a much higher degree than similarly paid athletes could.
> Physicality is far more measurable
Who cares. Do you believe that only people whose output could be precisely measured should be highly compensated?
Of course there is a lot of inefficiency considering Pichai seems to be a very poor CEO who’s quite replaceable.
You don't think LeBron has any say in the teammates they sign?
Tom Brady famously got Gronk out of retirement and Brown was on the team because of Brady despite having a horrible reputation and being essentially blacklisted from the NFL.
Star players are a dime a dozen in professional sports and I don't think their influence on the team makeup is as rare as you think. In fact, a big name star might have _more_ hiring power than a typical CEO in a public company.
Attempting to change the subject doesn't change the fact that this obscene compensation amounts to stealing from the pockets of his own employees. Rather than structuring Google as a dictatorship, how about we structure it as a democracy and ask Googlers what they think the CEO should be paid, at their own expense. Do you think they would come up with a number that is less or more than the current figure?