If EA Board could snatch a CEO they like for $5M/year, they would. So why don't they? I'm sure there are thousands of professional managers with solid game industry experience who'd be ecstatic to be offered a CEO position in either company at $5M / year or less. The Board clearly think they are not good enough, and limit their candidate search to people with very special credentials (e.g., those who've served as top executives in large companies, etc.). Such a high bar limits the candidate supply a lot, and then the competition for those candidates between companies drive up the pay (quite similar to NBA or NFL).<p>Why is Board so obsessed with credentials? Is it because they want to play it safe (kinda like dumb execs choose Oracle over open source solutions because they want to protect themselves from criticism by going with a famous brand)? Or is it because those credentials are truly imporant for the success of EA?<p>I don't know for certain but I suspect the answer is kinda in between. The quality of a CEO candidate is really hard to judge. So the Boards think like this:<p>> We'll screen for all the obvious things (experience, references, track record, culture fit, etc.). Hundreds of people will pass that screen. We have no clue of how to choose among them, so we might as well go for someone who's done it before. Perhaps we don't need to be so restrictive. But there's a chance it actually does matter, say maybe 10% chance that a person who's been a top exec before will do better than candidates without such credentials. A good CEO can increase corporate value by billions of dollars over a few years, so even a 10% chance is worth a lot. So let's go bid for one of those bigshot ex-CEOs, even if that means we have to pay an extra $20M/year.<p>So in some sense, high CEO pay is due to the "religious" belief that whoever made it to the top is super good.<p>Maybe this religious belief is actually rational, maybe not. I kinda suspect the latter, since other countries seem to pay CEOs a lot less; I find it unlikely that the US CEOs have such unusually high skill compared to the rest of the world. But I don't have high confidence in my opinion.