Besides the obvious inequality, and unlike Messi, ceos rig the game.

If the company performs incredibly well, they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they completely fuck up... they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they're essentially fired for cause after 5 months... they receive enough wealth to retire ($7.3m for 130 days including weekends) [1]. If an already stunningly wealth ceo submits fraudulent expense reports trying to get in the pants of one of his employees (who doesn't seem to have been much besides eye candy), demonstrating at bare minimum incredibly poor judgement along with the possibility of sexual harassment, he's given dynastic levels of wealth ($40m) and merely made to resign. [2] In short, there's no performance requirement.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/technology/yahoo-ceo-no-seve...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/backlash-against-hewlett-pack...

AFAIK every one of those statements can be replacing the CEO with a sports star and everything is still true

In short, there's no performance requirement?

Sounds nice except when you consider that:

1. Even Leo Messi isn't "1000x more productive/as talented as the average [footballer]". Messi is a difference maker to be sure, and one might even say he counts for two or three men on the pitch, but even an extreme outlier like him only, perhaps, double or triples the statistics of another very good player. 1000x? No, simply no.

2. All of the recent studies coming out demonstrating that highly paid CEOs have no correlation with high performance, or worse either a correlation or possible contributor to poor performance, would say differently.

3. While most CEOs are certainly talented, many simply achieve their position thanks to connections and networking, and are not necessarily superhumans compared to their employees.

So no, this really says nothing about pay equality.

1000x is a bit much, but double/triple production is hugely significant when you realize that teams are constrained to only playing 11 players at once. Its not like they can make up his production with 2 average players playing together.

Nah, people have been able to block even Piero if they gang up on him at once this world cup. Messi himself was stiffled by Iran until the last few minutes of the game.

That's how most of the teams have been able to counter Messi so far; whenever he gets the ball, make sure two or three guys are on him. That he's still scored four goals despite that is a testament to his prodigious skill, but its certainly been effective at cutting that number down.

You're sort of on the right track with this (and I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted). The difference in talent of the top 250 or so CEOs is actually very small, but the huge size of modern companies means that even a small difference in CEO talent makes a huge difference in dollars.

Gabaix and Landier [0] run a counterfactual (based on their model) and suggest that "if firm number 250 could, at no extra salary cost, replace for a year its CEO by the best CEO in the economy, its market capitalization would go up by only 0.016%. ... this talent difference implies that the pay of CEO number 1 exceeds that of CEO number 250 by 530%. Substantial firm size leads to the economics of superstars, translating small differences in abil- ity into very large differences in pay."

[0] http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/123/1/49.abstract

250 doesn't sound like a large enough statistical sample to eke out even the most trivial performance differences in a single person when you consider the size of the companies being discussed.

High pay isn't really the issue so much as spiraling executive pay while other wages are stagnating and the economy is screwed. Also, if tech was run like modern football, the engineers salaries would be far higher. Tech is more like the old days of football before the players got more control over their contracts.

Definitely. Sports star salaries aren't keeping up with growing gate receipts, concession sales, TV DEALS, etc. Especially when you at the short careers and how injury can derail things. Owners/club execs are laughing all the way to the bank.

It's almost more like a guy going broke trying to invest his life savings on a stock tip than a CEO. You fail to ascend to superstardom? You end up with no money, no roots since you've moved around 30 times in five years, few employable skills outside of being physically fit, but wait... you're not physically fit because your body is broken from years of abuse.

I don't know if ya'll are watching the world cup right now but Messi was stifled by Iran, and Nigeria just recently. Belgium is coming up next so....

Argentina would be doing far better with a team that play together better than with Lionel Messi at the helm, and Messi himself said so.

Statistically, high paid CEOs are worth less than low paid ones. There's a negative correlation between CEO pay and stock performance.