[fogzen]

Having been a CEO and around many CEOs... they of course do work. But they don't do x250 times more work of another worker. It's just a different type of work. Yet all work from every employee is critical for the enterprise to function. And in my experience, they often do less work than many employees in terms of hours. If you're an on-call engineer for example, your CEO doesn't get paged and have to wake up in the middle of the night. If you look at any enterprise the CEO is likely not the one doing the most work. That's kind of the whole point and the reason they want to become a CEO/founder (to capture a larger share of the wealth for the work they put in).

Capitalist enterprises (with owners vs non-owner workers) are fundamentally non-meritocratic and exploitative. Everyone works to generate value, and only a small class of workers captures the bulk of the value.