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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

That is a fair critique and overall true. But it also highlights the pay of these CEOs to be so absurd as to be barely comprehensible. It makes me wonder what types of personalities these people are. If I even had that salary for a year, max three, I'd retire and spend time learning and doing non-profit and foundation work.

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That's why you'll never make CEO pay. Most people, myself included, will happily retire with a couple million.

A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something.

Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year instead? That's how much you need to pay them next year.

Has there ever been a case of a CEO singularly or even collectively achieving said ambitions? No. A lot of these people are cut throat, near sociopaths in personality. I guess we should be lucky they're just CEOs. If they're not of that personality, it's often largely due to luck. James Simons, who has had a large impact via his foundation work, in which he ensures funding for people to drive their own ideas versus his, readily and humbly admits that luck is very underappreciated in success.

And it's honestly not really anything to do with retirement. It's about doing something with my life that isn't just following someone else's ideas, who just happens to be higher in the pecking order than me.

Whatever their ambitions are, it doesn't seem to be something that's doing the world very well. Inequality is increasing, climate change is boiling us alive. Houses keep getting more and more unaffordable... These people only work for themselves and their close circles. It just doesn't seem to be a structure of governance that is doing the world very good.

People for whom being an important executive is at least almost as important as having as much money as they can reasonably consume.

Certainly there’s a vast range of FIRE styles and even what constitutes retirement but at some level it’s a combination of keeping score, feeling valued relative to peers (see also sports), and the industry recognition.

In other words: ego. Executives exist to play a game of ego.

Unlike all the software engineers at Google who would be happy to have their various titles replaced with some egalitarian "developer" title.

Most people have egos. Some more than others. And public recognition via titles matters a lot for future opportunities. (Though maybe you don't care much about that so long as you make enough money.)

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