Do you truly think there is no one on earth who could do a better job than Pinchai for, let's say, $80M a year? $40M a year? $30M a year? $10M a year? Why is there downward pressure on wages for everyone except for this particular position?

His pay is huge, but not huge when spread across 12K people. You couldn't keep them employed on $250M/3yrs

I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.

Perhaps not all of them, but you could certainly choose to keep some.

On the other hand, perhaps you could. Just dividing the numbers out doesn’t account for whatever value they’re producing.

If that person who can do a better job exists and can be identified, we should hire them and not waste time worrying about how much they are paid. It’s more important somebody else doesn’t hire them first.

Btw if you have some repeatable mechanism for proving the suitability of CEO candidates, maybe you should be doing executive recruiting for a liking.

On what basis are people saying that he's responsible for the company's increase in valuation over the past 8 years? For all we know he's just sitting in his office twiddling his thumbs.

If I own Google, I’m not willing to run the experiment of hiring a thumb-twiddler to run my trillion-dollar company to save a few hundred million dollars. I’m willing to pay an extra hundred million dollars to hire someone who appears to be 1% less likely to be a thumb-twiddler, even though I don’t have an oracle that can measure candidates perfectly.

In reality, there are few people who have had to opportunity to show their ability to run Google. You have the small set of people who ran tech companies as big as Google, or who ran big parts of Google. Those people are in high demand, which is why hundreds of millions of dollars is the market rate for the most appealing of the bunch.

Risk? He's a known quantity. There may be 1000 guys more capable than Pichai. Alas, there are at least two thorny questions:

* How do you find one of these guys in the haystack with any degree of confidence?

* How much time would one of them need to build a professional network at the same level as Pichai?

FWIW, I do find these compensation packages obscene. Just working out same thinly disguised math.