> Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor.
I am. It's not me being careless. We reward both by the same means - money. Not my fault it's this way. I think it's perfectly reasonable of me to work from the means of compensation outwards, when making comparisons.
> The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than business based, pyramid scheme level, cult-like thinking. I'm a well paid webdev. The company is fairly flat, there are only two distinct levels above me - engineering management, and founder-ceo(s).
My day to day work is designing and building out random systems, and handling tech debt. I would be doing this in a vacuum too, and to the same standard. The personality and input of the ceo has little to no bearing on my performance. Me and my team would perform equally well under any given non-maniac. CEOs are not like, high level gods or something. They aren't remotely as rare a set of personality traits as the voodoo-thinking of SV seems to think. C-tier management is not literally multiplying my output. Sensible feature requests from users and sensible filtering by product managers has ten times the impact that C-tier has on my work.
> deserves a proportional [...]
> Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that
The resignation and subsequent death of Jobs had, in the macro perspective of apple's stock prices, literally no impact on the value of the company. Apple stock is currently over x10 what it was when he was there. An essentially infinite number of things took place that were far more important than Job's personality, which lead to the success of apple. He was more like a train driver railing down the tracks than some maverick cutting through the jungle. At least Bill Gates has the introspection to realise this. General luck, and luck of timing is what generated nearly all of that value, and the rest was generated by labour. Somewhere in there is some ephemeral and unquantifiable sliver of value coming from the specific personality of the founders / ceos.
So, what proportion do we dole out? Who do we compensate for luck? For all of the endless work done before that wasn't compensated to the moon but was absolutely required for this moon-level capital generation? It's all too up in the air to try and rationalise that CEOs should earn one million times what a farmer earns and think that makes any kind of sense at all.
Think of all of the wealth, (generational too) that came from equally traited men setting out for oil. Literal random chance would go on to create mega-empires that have lasted a hundred years. Our current system of compensation, is pretty close to being nothing more than a load of bollocks, when it comes to this kind of thing.