People throw their arms up and say "How the hell can a CEO pay themselves 1000 times what the lowest paid staff gets paid"
But that CEO may be a "Messi".
Some people really are 1,000x more productive/as talented as the average person. And so should be compensated accordingly.
If the company performs incredibly well, they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they completely fuck up... they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they're essentially fired for cause after 5 months... they receive enough wealth to retire ($7.3m for 130 days including weekends) [1]. If an already stunningly wealth ceo submits fraudulent expense reports trying to get in the pants of one of his employees (who doesn't seem to have been much besides eye candy), demonstrating at bare minimum incredibly poor judgement along with the possibility of sexual harassment, he's given dynastic levels of wealth ($40m) and merely made to resign. [2] In short, there's no performance requirement.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/technology/yahoo-ceo-no-seve...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/backlash-against-hewlett-pack...
1. Even Leo Messi isn't "1000x more productive/as talented as the average [footballer]". Messi is a difference maker to be sure, and one might even say he counts for two or three men on the pitch, but even an extreme outlier like him only, perhaps, double or triples the statistics of another very good player. 1000x? No, simply no.
2. All of the recent studies coming out demonstrating that highly paid CEOs have no correlation with high performance, or worse either a correlation or possible contributor to poor performance, would say differently.
3. While most CEOs are certainly talented, many simply achieve their position thanks to connections and networking, and are not necessarily superhumans compared to their employees.
So no, this really says nothing about pay equality.
Gabaix and Landier [0] run a counterfactual (based on their model) and suggest that "if firm number 250 could, at no extra salary cost, replace for a year its CEO by the best CEO in the economy, its market capitalization would go up by only 0.016%. ... this talent difference implies that the pay of CEO number 1 exceeds that of CEO number 250 by 530%. Substantial firm size leads to the economics of superstars, translating small differences in abil- ity into very large differences in pay."
It's almost more like a guy going broke trying to invest his life savings on a stock tip than a CEO. You fail to ascend to superstardom? You end up with no money, no roots since you've moved around 30 times in five years, few employable skills outside of being physically fit, but wait... you're not physically fit because your body is broken from years of abuse.
Argentina would be doing far better with a team that play together better than with Lionel Messi at the helm, and Messi himself said so.