No.

The only time an executive would deserve something like that is if they found a way to ensure that every employee working for them was taken care of first, that their product was incomparable, and that they paid back all the debt owed by the company.

If anyone was laid off or not covered by insurance or customers were unhappy or the business owed a dime, the executives have FAILED in their jobs.

Executive compensations are out of line with reality because executives like entertainers, they have agents to do the negotiations.

On top of that there is the mistaken belief that if it cost more it has to be better. Now we can just look at the 20 top people that brought down AIG Financial Products. They cost more so they must be the best.

[...] Do executives really deserve their million-dollar salaries? [...]

Like most things at the exec level these days, it is amazing that an exec can be worth so many millions per annum, especially with all the extra perks that they also are lavished with.

We often see where companies are in a very bad state of affairs, then to find out that the chiefs are being pain outlandish amounts of money that could have bolstered the company during its demise.

Having been raised by depression era grandparents and their way of seeing things.

The answer is a no.

I have no issues with making money to purchase things, pay bills and a little to retire on.

I object to complete and total anarchy in the market place. Some financial services need to be regulated and monitored. For example, retirement and futures.

Twenty years ago I could see a CEO or even a CEO being able to take home a massive bonus under decent circumstances.

However, these days that upper echelon of business seems to be more of a “boys club”. Getting paid more than everyone else surely means you did the best job right? Wrong.

Personal experience with former CEO’s turned consultants has led me to believe their primary goal in business is to exploit the naiivity of their workforce, pocket what they saved there, then see if the business still works in a years time.

If the business is still solvent, take more money. If not, leave.

These people don’t have “talent” anymore than Paul Castellano did when by primogeniture he became the boss of the Gambino mafia family. General Motors, while sitting on bankruptcy’s death row, comes out with the new, all new, Camaro - a bloody gas guzzling, muscle car - ostensibly getting 17 mpg and advertising additional “performance packages”. I recognize that talent, I’m a retired psychotherapist, it’s called psychosis and in this case it’s displayed by delusions of grandeur and derealization.

Imagine you are on the board of directors.

You are in the position where you need to hire a new CEO. Your $3 Billion company has been floundering and the competition has gotten fierce. Over the last year your sales have gone down 5% and your projections show that sales will continue to decrease at an accelerated pace.

How do you negotiate salaries with potential CEOs?

Most CEO salaries are tied to performance. Even set salaries that are outlined in contracts are there to make sure good CEOs stay with the company.

For anyone to say some CEO makes too much money most likely doesn’t have all the information.

On the other hand corrupt CEOs, you know the ones that give corporate America a bad name, tend to stack the board of directors in their favor.

The real problem in all of this isn’t that CEOs get paid obscene amounts of money. The problem is bad corporate governance.

So, one company lures an executive from another company for a huge salary and an immense amount of perks. What generally happens is that executive basically stays around for a few years at the most then dumps them. Look at AIG. An executive that was hired not many months back is resigning: take the money and run — and it’s our tax money. Do they deserve it? @#$% NO! It’s the same in education. Administrators are highly (over) paid while the teachers do so much work and have to fight to get a COLA. It’s the employees who do the work, not the CEOs but it’s the CEOs who get the big bucks.

Yes they should. It is an ongoing demonstration of the law of diminishing returns. The more you pay, the less you get.

If your foundering company needs to pay an exorbitant salary to lure away that talent to help you reverse 20 years of mismanagement, you need to have the downward spiral tightened by taking on more expense with less return. It helps line the executive’s pocket at the expense of the future viability of the foundering company, and we all see that is a good thing. It helps put the economy on a sound foundation and makes sure the fundamentals of our economy are strong.