[underlipton]

>Say a full time employee earns $150k

I don't know why you would. That's an egregiously high mark to use for a general statement on CEO vs employee earnings. It better figure is probably close to 1/3rd than even 2/3rds of that. Their total cost is not going to be 2x.

I don't know why you'd obfuscate with such unrealistic numbers, because the fact remains that cutting the CEO down to 0 is probably still not enough. The correct thing to do would be to cut the CEO down to zero AND cut most of the C-suite a significant portion* AND cut management and supervisor roles some smaller amount AND cut a nominal amount from all employees earning over a certain mark (perhaps 2x the median). With that, you will have executive, management, and labor all alike able to weather the economic storm. I find that more morally palatable than the seeming status quo of kicking out the workers least able to deal with a downturn.

*(as mentioned in another comment, Nintendo did this after the Wii U came in last during its console generation)