[jayd16]

If you look at the cost of living in SF and what you get, it starts to make sense. What is the equivalent argument for hundreds of millions?

[oars]

Janitors, baristas, waiters, waitresses, bus drivers are also living in the Bay Area on nowhere close to those salaries.

SF engineer salaries are still insane to these people. And they need to deal with the cost of living in SF.

[cscurmudgeon]

Why should there be a justification? The only argument should be between Google and Pichai.

Strangely, why aren't we doing the same for actors and sports stars?

[cudgy]

Poor example. How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

How many movies do people attend solely based on the actors in the movie? Or sporting events due to a player on a team? Many

[cscurmudgeon]

Poor logic. Why should that matter? The initial argument was that no one should need that much money.

The sporting events can't take place soley due to the star. Do you think the star built the stadium or did all the background work for a movie? By this logic, movies with novice actors should always do bad.

> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company?

Not explicitly.

What about founder CEOs who built v1 on their own?

[cudgy]

A CEO cannot be a CEO (unless they are a founder which is a different matter altogether) without an existing enterprise with equipment and real estate to manage, so I don’t see the point there.

Founder CEOs are founders of the company and of course they will receive large payouts. The gripe is with non-founder executive vp sliding into CEO jobs and going from making $1 million a year to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year practically guaranteed with all sorts of golden parachutes attached.

[ztrww]

> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).

By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.

[cudgy]

How do you measure what affect the CEO had? CEOs (like Jack Welch for example) get great acclaim for years according to short term benchmarks only to be proven to have made disastrous decisions for the business. Appraisal of CEOs is more witchcraft than science.