The cost of options is borne by shareholders more than by the company's compensation budget. I picked a random large company from Yahoo finance (Proctor and Gamble). The CEO's pay is $4M/year. If you paid him nothing, the rest of the employees would get an additional ~ $.75/week.

GE (another fairly large company) is in approximately the same situation. Immelt gets about 4x as much, but GE has about 3x as many employees.