Barclays CEO pay slashed after he tried to identify whistleblower

... but no (slight) slap on the hand, and not even going to bed without dinner ...

His mistake was not working as a CEO in the USA... everyone knows CEOs there make hundreds of trillions of dollars. /s

"CEO pay is wrong"

What does this mean? Paying CEOs is wrong? The pay that all CEOs get is wrong? The pay that some CEOs get is wrong?

This might be a reasonable complaint if that sentence were completely divorced from context.

Overpaid relative to what? Your estimation of perceived value? What do you define as value? How would you even begin to empirically establish what you're saying?

Executive compensation is a construct of market consensus, not an absolute based on individual performance. The tangible value contributed by chief executive staff is one component of the compensation package, and what is valuable to the board or shareholders in aggregate may be utterly dissimilar to what you'd consider valuable. Your premise in why an executive should be paid is probably different from the premises used by those who actually choose what the executive will be paid.

The difficulty in finding an appropriate candidate, the risk of their having to publicly "fall on the sword" for the company, their contributed value, their particular skills/culture match, their years of experience, their network of available connections, etc all play a part in determining the compensation. And what's more, you may not measure each of these things with the same respective weighting or definition that the company would.

This is to say that you can arbitrarily say that executives as a class are overpaid, and I can arbitrarily say they're underpaid. You're free to propose a new compensation model, but for better or worse, most boards and shareholders seem fine with the status quo. Given that, it's not very productive to make a blanket statement about them being over or under-compensated if we can't establish that we're all working from the same set of premises.

You'd have about as much rigor in claiming that TSLA is overvalued relative to GM. Sure, you might be right, but 1) why listen to you rather than, say Zacks and 2) what makes your model of compensation more valid, when you have to surmount the burden of not just correctness but market consensus?