> Its all still horse shit, but if you want to tear down the American CEO institution you have to understand their first and primary argument is that they can still do things others can't, because they're (reportedly) in those smoke filled room where "big deals get done".

Sure—and I'm serious that I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape for non-shitty (i.e. not corruption or principal-agent-problem) reasons such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash, but it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way and things were... basically fine. Not that there weren't huge advantages to being in the "right" set, or whatever, as there has been in any time and place, but that it seems like for the specific case of CEOs it used to be more acceptable to train up existing employees, who didn't start their employment with the company somewhere in the top-exec echelon, into those kinds of roles, which behavior seems like it would act as a pretty effective relief valve on CEO comp getting out of control.

What's going on now sure looks like what would happen if the people in charge of hiring for these roles had a strong interest in keeping the compensation extremely high. But it's still possible there's something else going on, and there are good, non-corrupt motivations at work.

> it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way

I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.

Its still worth being passionate about and rebelling against. While the general theme of the corruption may be similar its still eventful that it is occurring in new areas and in new ways (i.e. SPACs, ICOs).

> I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.

The 90s might be the wrong point to measure from. Isn't it pretty well documented that CEOs are getting paid greater "multiples" of average pay than they had in the past (e.g. they used to be paid 100x, now they're paid 1000x)?

Many of the things used to balance the scales in the past are no longer possible, historically if you owned a business, the workers (who lived in the same area, spoke the same language, and drank at the same pub) could unionize, or decide that they were going to compete with the original business. Now you have a generic international labor force, who dont trust each other, and have large legal infrastructures preventing them from directly forming competing businesses.

Admittedly, the "used to" is rather longer ago than the 90s :-) More like through the 70s.

> I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape ... such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash...

Even if there was a big advantage to hire from the same small pool of acceptable candidates, that's no justification for paying them "entire train cars full of cash." There's all kinds of scarce and valuable skills that are just as rare but compensation doesn't shoot off to infinity.