“average top CEO compensation was $15.6 million in 2021, up 9.8% since 2020. In 2021, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 399-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a big increase from 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989”
I think it’s not so much that people can’t look up the roles, but that most people grinding away in a wage-slave role don’t have context for what is actually done at the higher level. They are too insulated from the day to day of those roles which make it easier to write them off wholesale as useless. That being said, CEO compensation across the board is not in line with any actual productivity or effectiveness metrics, let’s be real, and certainly should not be anywhere near as high in comparison to the average employee. But that’s a separate and more nuanced conversation that can’t be solved with a simple “fire all CEOs hurdur” comments that you’ll see online.
CEOs often do real work for a company, people who sit on a board don’t. Board directors are often on the boards of several companies, because being on one board alone is not nearly hard enough to qualify being a job in and of itself.
These people rake in money as if each of those board seats were a super job, effectively equivalent to hundreds or thousands of workers, while it requiring no where near the level of effort or expertise that an actual job requires.
Capitalism isn’t meritocratic like pro-capitalists love to believe. Capitalism is a system designed for and by the owner class to protect said property owning class.
If you want a meritocracy, you want a market socialist system. It’ll still have some problems capitalism has by the nature of markets (externalized costs aren’t accounted for by markets), but it’s at least a proper meritocracy when renting humans is illegal like buying them already is.