Much of this can be accounted for by the simple fact that the companies have gotten bigger. Top CEOs are in charge of <i>more people</i> than ever before. Walmart has 1.4 million employees; if their CEO makes $35 million that's $25 per employee per year - a penny or so per hour per employee.<p>If a good CEO's decisions can make the average employee <i>more productive</i> (or less <i>unproductive</i>) by even few cents per hour of employment, he's worth that magnitude of salary when working for a company that big.<p>If we highlight the CEO-to-employee multiple, companies could game the metric by splitting into smaller companies that are <i>slightly less efficient</i>. For instance, there could be separate regional chains called "Walmart West" and "Walmart East", each with their own CEO who gets paid half as much for doing half as much work. They could even both hire the same guy and have him work both jobs at once, thereby reducing to a previously-solved problem! Or they could actually hire two distinct CEOS, which benefits the employees not at all - in fact, the employee situation might be made <i>worse</i> in various ways by the change - but at least the multiple would officially look smaller so: yay?
Last year, Tim Cook's salary plus bonus was $9 million. But his total compensation was $65 million.[1] So what? Why should I care? That's up to the Apple board to work out with him.<p>I'm still buying Macbooks and iPhones and iWhatevers for as long as I think they're superior to the competition.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/tim-cook-s-65-million-pay-is-best-deal-among-top-paid-u-s-ceos" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/tim-cook-s...</a>
Yet another clickbait headline.<p>Further down in the article, it says: "Of course, people tend to show more moral gumption in surveys than they do in real life. In part this is because we are dealing with hypotheticals (who isn’t against child labor, in principle?). But also, people don't usually ponder issues of inequality while they’re buying their milk and groceries."
Im really curious why this matters to so many people. It only matters if you own part of the company and if this is the case, you most likely took part in the decision making process that gave the ceo this dalary.