Imagine you are an amazing developer, and a company with a terrible codebase and a high risk of technical problems wants to hire you, precisely because it is aware it has problems and needs you. Then the company says "oh, and if we have any technical problems your pay will be zero." You would be extremely unlikely to take that role, regardless of the salary they were promising in the event of technical success. Every hire, including CEO's who work for the board of directors, is subject to that same calculus. If a company is at risk of doing terribly, it will often seek to bring in a new CEO or retain an existing CEO. If that CEO knows they will receive no compensation in the not-unlikely to expected scenario of the company doing poorly, they will walk away from the offer, even if they are the best candidate to potentially solve the company's woes, precisely because anyone who is the best candidate to solve the company's woes is good enough to obtain another better offer that doesn't contain a punitive no salary for you clause.
Most CEOs in the USA can demand contracts that give them a massive golden umbrella, fail or not. Why would any CEO accept less than that?
But to answer the harder question, I don't think anyone should get paid at that rate. No one is worth that much once you take into account negative externalities. As an extreme example, Exxon executives might be worth a negative number to society at this point.
Getting more nuanced, huge wage gaps are highly correlated with lots of costly things like increased crimes rates, and less costly but important things like happiness.
I think the world is increasingly becoming aware that the USA is nowhere near #1 in many measures, and that a handful of other countries have managed to make a measurably better society. And in all those countries you see far smaller wage gaps. Could be correlation, but I think with enough time we will see that it is causation. Humans instinctively know that kings are not God-like and CEOs are not worth 200x more than the thousands of employees who work just as hard. Leaders with benefits are fine. Leaders with excessive benefits have never ended well in all of human history. The fact that it is happening now due to "market forces" instead of royal lineage. perhaps makes it a bit more tolerable temporarily. But I think those huge wage gaps are increasingly becoming less tolerable even to Americans. Other countries have already arrived.
The shareholders disagree and the CEO compensation comes out of the shareholders' pockets.
> who work just as hard
It's not about working hard. It's about making the right decisions.
> Other countries have already arrived.
On the other hand, US companies are the most prosperous in the world, and contribute enormously to the US economy. All the FAANG companies are in the US, for example.
The average employee makes decisions all the time.
And yes, the companies are prosperous. A few benefit. Society at large not so much. The US is behind by many measures.
They can sell their shares if they don't accept it. Presumably whoever buys it accepts it.
> Society at large not so much
Nobody has been able to connect high CEO pay with detriments to society at large.
You are wrong about detriments to society, and a simple search would have saved you. Just as one example, large income gaps are highly correlated with higher crime rates [1]. This has been shown in many studies, and across cultures. There are other negative effects as well, including both the rich and the poor being less happy. I suggest you do the work of trying to prove yourself wrong and you'll find even more.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...
Amazon employs 50,000 highly paid people in Seattle alone, but only 1 CEO. Bezos' CEO pay is hardly responsible for income inequality in Seattle.
The SF law like most of these laws includes all forms of compensation, not just salary. Bezos total compensation over the years including bonuses and stock options is indeed responsible for the huge wage gap of almost a million Amazon employees, along with the other people Bezos encounters in his life.
And he is just one CEO. Pretty easy to see where this would lead. CEOs are indeed responsible for many of the daily wage gaps most workers experience.
If you are the CEO and your company does terribly, you should probably get paid 0 that year.