It pays well to be a (failed) CEO

Contrariwise, I'm actually in favor of CEO severance packages. A CEO can do enormous damage to a company and if the board thinks that they're doing something wrong it's very difficult to oust them on any kind of reasonable time period. Getting failures out now can easily be worth tens or even hundreds of millions to a company, so handing Mr. Apotheker a few million bucks to go away is probably well worth it.

Of course, CEO's shouldn't be paid that much in the first place (I do tend to think in almost all cases that the bad a poor CEO can do outweighs by several times the good a good CEO can), which would tend to lessen the value of severance packages overall. But if any Fortune 500 CEO deserves anything close to their current compensation package, spending only $10mm to fire one sooner rather than later is an excellent deal.