>The real question is whether their networking has a value of hundreds of millions to the company, or to the CEO

And this is an important consideration for the board of directors/shareholders to consider.

>Why not? It's enough to live a very comfortable life. If you want to, you can retire after a single-digit number of years. Anyone who needs more money clearly has a serious spending problem and shouldn't be anywhere near your company's finances.

If someone is good enough to attract a higher salary, then the salary cap will send them to somewhere without the cap. You would likely keep the people simply able to talk their way into higher salaries, but guarantee that any actual talent goes offshore.

>And the whole "but look how much money they are making/saving the company" argument you usually hear is bullshit as well.

Arguable. CEO isnt meant to be peak sales guy, but it often is peak sales guy. The issue with this line of thinking is that it ends with "Well lets just pay them performance/sales bonuses" which is actually how a lot of them are getting big payments, but people are also already mad about those for some reason.

If you land a 20 million dollar recurring revenue contract, and you had a previous commitment to 5% of that as a bonus, your previous commitment should be honored. If you get an offer to come do that for someone else for 10 million per year, that's reasonable.

> I bet there are plenty of mid-level FAANG engineers who have saved their company literally tens of millions of dollars a year by optimizing some code, but they don't get those obscene salaries either.

If an engineer negotiated a contract that included such a provision it would be great. I imagine most engineers aren't as capable as a CEO to negotiate such a contract. Its not impossible I am aware of an engineer that resolved a technical issue for a stock exchange nabbing a few mil in bonuses that year. Mostly these things exist in the contract/consultancy space.

>It gets even worse once you take into account the bottom rungs on the ladder: paying the CEO tens or hundreds of millions a year would be a lot less problematic if that very same company didn't have workers literally peeing in bottles, having to work around the body of their dead coworker, or having the building literally collapse on their head.

Ok, is that a fixed goalpost or is it on wheels? Mike Cannon-Brookes is worth a few billion. Is anyone peeing in bottles or wrangling dead bodies at Atlassian?

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