I have a suggestion. Make the pay equal. The janitor and the CEO should make the same amount of money.
If money is not a factor, I want to feel important, have people suck up to me, travel on corporate jet, etc.
:-)
The janitor goes home after their shift and is completely free. They get their 4 weeks vacation and max 40 hour working week and can do whatever they want in their spare time.
Oh please! What is the consequence of a CEO failing to perform up to expectation?
They get a golden parachute, take off with a mountain of cash and stock, and get rehired as a CEO of some other company. Once you reach that level you pretty much never have to worry about money or your job ever again, unless you're massively irresponsible with money or start committing crimes that can land you in jail.
Compare that with a typical worker whose entire family depends on them having a job, who's living paycheck to paycheck, and who is far from guaranteed to find another job if they're fired. They typically get absolutely nothing if they get fired, and if they don't find another job soon they and their family might be out on the street.
How's that for pressure?
You also seem to be quite ignorant to what a CEO does, and the stakes of the position. Failure for a CEO can end your career, regardless of whether you’ve already established yourself as entirely financially independent. It is also by definition the position of greatest responsibility in a company. There is nobody in a company that faces greater pressure to perform.
If you fail at your job, it’s really unlikely that your failure will be dissected in the news paper for everyone to see. You could get fired and go out and get a new job. For a disgraced CEO, this is usually not an option. We could all point out a couple of examples of revolving door CEOs, but for most executives, this isn’t a career path or even an option.
For starters, unless you've got a lot of executive experience, if you had to turn up to work tomorrow and be the CEO, you'd be awful at it. So would I, so would anybody else that doesn't have that experience. I guess this wouldn't evenly apply to early stage start-ups, but they tend to not have much executive leadership anyway, regardless of whether they have a "CEO".
Being the CEO is all responsibility. There's very little room for error, and you unavoidably have to deal with a myriad of issues that you will have no personal interest in whatsoever. It is absolutely the most high pressure and difficult job in an organisation. If it weren't, then anybody could do it, when obviously that's not true. Also, if you're measuring who is the most stressed in an organisation, then you're going to come up against a lot of selection bias. You'd expect CEOs to have a better responsibility to stress ratio, because you'd expect CEOs to be better at managing stress.