I get people see one-on-one comparison in salary and it can appear stark. But I do workforce management and planning for a career. The last place I worked at spent $2.1B in employee costs annually—around 17.5K active employees which is actually not that big—,while chief officers were on close to $1M. If they were canabalised, people would get a few extra bucks in their paycheck, fuck all.

The CEO got paid that well because they could handle a $2.1B employee cost company, so obviously other companies want them since few people can do that with success, so obviously they were paid their worth.

Edit: Granted, this is in Australia where there’s a lot less capitalistic energy.