The way I have started looking at it is CEOs/founders won the lottery. They control the keys, but they share a tiny fraction of the gold with the employees.

I come to this conclusion, b/c I think its extremely rare that the 'best' person to be the executive on day0 is rarely the 'best' person to be an executive in every stage of a company's lifecycle. but the executives can cling on, b/c they have low accountability (especially when they are the board).

Is it easy to win the lottery? No. Once you win the lottery, is life easier? Yes.

if it's not equally easy for all people to win, not a lottery.

Chipotle's stock dropped 10% and Starbucks's rose 25% when the CEO switched from one to the other this past week. If this guy is just a meritless lottery winner, then you can make a lot of money betting against the market and the extremely large group of heavily motivated and intelligent investors who think otherwise.

Ah yes, the "if you're truly right clearly you would be rich using that information to trade" argument. Would you be willing to consider that the market is not always smart or a good measure of how we should value things?

Would you be willing to consider that some half baked theory about why CEOs are the manifestation of luck is actually just an unhealthy way of coping with failures?

Consider? Sure. I see a lot of evidence that points away from it, though.

More like survivor bias. For every eBay, amazon, Starbucks ceo, there's a multitude of failures that weren't as good or lucky.

So, bad CEOs are bad? What a revelation. We're not isolating this analysis to bad ones (who generally don't last very long). We're talking about a blanket, overarching, ill-informed and bitter "analysis" that contends CEOs are meritless lottery winners.

Have you ever seen any process of filtering job candidates that doesn't have massive failures? Look no further than sports. There is no profession with more accessible information about candidate qualifications, and we still see significant failures, signing people to hundreds of millions of dollars who never produce any value over a replacement player. Does that mean the process is no better than throwing darts at phone book? No. There are still actual skills that are hard to attain, and are decent predictors of performance.

When it comes to CEOs, despite the fact that this process doesn't value YOUR skills very highly doesn't mean it's purely random. It means you've either chosen to ignore this filtering process, you never learned what the process is, or you aren't good enough to stand out within it. But that doesn't mean it's a zero-signal filtration.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

There are plenty of CEOs who came out of nothing, grinded and took risks. They also didn't act entitled, played victim and blamed luck

I don't understand your point are you saying that most CEOs are founders who started the company? I am willing to bet that this not even true for startups but it is certainly not true for your average CEO.

Also funny thing, typically people consider the "golden area" of US capitalism on which most of current prosperity is built the 50s and 60s, the ratio between exec pay and average employee pay is orders of magnitude different now. Interestingly, the US has lost most of its engineering and manufacturing abilities in the same time. Not sure if that is an indication of the greatest country in the world.