This is like wanting to find a top-tier senior staff engineer for $30k/year in San Francisco. At the end of the day, the people who can do the job can also perform other roles, and those other roles already pay more than $1M/year. You have to convince them to take on an unprecedented amount of stress and responsibility and effectively act as a public figure with all the baggage that comes along with that. You also have to retain them and prevent competitors from hiring them and deploying them against you. That means you have to pay them more -- sometimes a lot more.
Also corporations partly exist to shield liability so CEOs are not going to be personally held responsible outside of gross negligence or criminal acts, the same way you wouldn't be held responsible if you caused a major outage in your company that lost customers. There is an general move towards more performance-based compensation though, which I think you would agree is a good thing.
And if I do a shit job I might have trouble getting hired too, but I'm not paid millions for it.
For some reason, I hear that they do fine all the time. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer ?
I'm asking because Google isn't giving me answers.
This is true for all jobs...
Not to mention sometimes CEO's performing badly results in a golden parachute... quite a far cry from your grunt worker getting laid off with no pension or benefits.
Golden parachutes are not about performance, it's about change of control like a company takeover or merger. It's very common and happens to many startup founders that get acquired. It's also not much different than severance which is offered to employees at large corporations.
Golden parachutes are extra insulation for CEOs and their performance can definitely cause them to exit a company with a parachute that otherwise would keep them. It is like severance except wildly higher and more often than not there is no severance for average workwrs, especially nowadays.
Either way, originally you made a statement about a CEO having negative impacts from their performance, but the exact same thing is true of everyone. A public story of a CEO performing badly is just as ethereal as a recommendation from a past job. Neither is a death sentence or a golden ticket, it's just a job and if you do it poorly you will have negative consequences. Publicity could serve an exiting CEO regardless of performance, that is not hard to conceive. It's just a different level of job people aren't blind to that. But to say they take greater personal risk by being a CEO, I don't buy that, they take the same risk as everyone else. If you do well you get rewarded, if you do poorly you're future is negatively affected. There's really nothing to support it's so different for a CEO.
Being a CEO is not a 9-5. Everything and anything a CEO does is monitored by a cadre of people.
You make it sound like they'll somehow lose out personally by losing the company 1000x their salary and hurting the livelihoods of workers, like they're somehow being compensated for personal risk.
What you cited represents no personal risk to the CEO. They already made their millions. Now maybe if CEOs were actually liable for the damage they could do to the company and economy, would it be more justified.