I get people see one-on-one comparison in salary and it can appear stark. But I do workforce management and planning for a career. The last place I worked at spent $2.1B in employee costs annually—around 17.5K active employees which is actually not that big—,while chief officers were on close to $1M. If they were canabalised, people would get a few extra bucks in their paycheck, fuck all.

The CEO got paid that well because they could handle a $2.1B employee cost company, so obviously other companies want them since few people can do that with success, so obviously they were paid their worth.

Edit: Granted, this is in Australia where there's a lot less capitalistic energy.

As an MBA, I will simply state that you all do not understand capitalism. A CEO is kind of like a sports star. They make what they make because they are making all the hard shots and keeping the team afloat. They are like the captain and coach of the team in one. It takes many years to curate the skills required to be a good CEO and there are only so many people good enough in each industry to take on the challenge. 21M is modest compared to Ford’s profits. If they provided less, he would simply move to a competitor in the same way that sports stars shop around. The idea that everyone in the company should have their salaries compared in terms of orders of magnitude of the CEO is insane. It’s like attempting to say that the janitor at a doctor’s office should have to make tens of thousands above the going rate of what a janitor’s output is worth on the open market simply because the star of the business is able to bring in a lot of money. In general, the idea that the CEO doesn’t work as hard as the line workers is incorrect. They CEO meets all day with direct reports and investors and steers the ship.