ok. But then they're using cash from the business to get the share count back down to prior levels, and it's still a net loss for Icahn. There are only 100 percents. If the management team gets more ownership through dilution, it means Carl Icahn owns less.

But the employees don't gain anything. You've modeled this is a fight between wall street and the CEO, entirely forgetting about employees who get no (or trivial) stock compensation.

Hypothetically, a company could pay 100M in stock to the CEO, and then issue 100M in stock buybacks to the CEO. This is functionally equivalent to paying the CEO 100M, but it wouldn't count in your salary numbers. And notably, both of these, stock buybacks and CEO pay, dilute wallstreet in the same way. But neither benefits employees.

To use the JP morgan example, (and this is roughly equivalent for Google), the company could stop stock buybacks, and instead pay every employee an additional $150,000.

That results in the CEO and wall street getting less money, and employees getting more.

Walmart and Coke modulate the share price in other ways, so stock buybacks won't tell a particularly interesting story.

Yes, and that cash is a part of the revenue that could be used to pay the workers who generated that revenue.

Thus CEO pay is absolutely the concern of workers, unions, and union supported politicians.