They could, but even if they cut it to 0, assuming going from $226 million compensation (number I found for 2022, most of which by far is stock), and median employee costing $300k (I found a number around $270k median total comp, but the total cost is higher), that makes room for about 750 additional employees. Google has about 150k employees, so I think they're laying off more than that. Of course there are other highly paid people in other top positions there too, but the thing about a CEO is, you only need one of them. If we would only consider cash, the number of employees would be much smaller.