The way I look at it, there are two kinds of CEOs. There are the ones that founded the company and have led the company according to their own personal vision. Many of them hold stock worth billions and they're generally looked up to as "captains of industry".
The other kind is the CEO who is hired by the board of directors. They're usually very well paid and given a lot of stock, but aren't wealthy the way, say, Bill Gates is wealthy. They also tend not to be as admired, since they didn't build the business from the ground up.
People wonder why the second class of CEO receives such lavish compensation, when they're essentially just a regular employee. I suspect that the compensation is actually part of the qualification for the job. It makes shareholders feel good if the CEO holds a lot of stock, because it's a strong incentive for them to put the interests of the shareholders (whom it's easy to stereotype as rich, entitled lazy people living lavishly off of passive investment income) above the interests of the employees the CEO works with every day (who are usually hard-working people who, if the company is successful, generate far more wealth than they're compensated for).
Normal human behavior would be to put the interests of the employees above the shareholders. Large stock grants counteract that. Sometimes I wonder if a hired CEO were to refuse to receive large stock grants, would that cause the shareholders to revolt and/or the board of directors to not hire or try to fire him/her, simply because they're not comfortable with a CEO who doesn't have an incentive to pump up the stock value.
(It's worth noting that shareholders can change their investments much easier than employees can change employers, so shareholders are more likely to prefer policies that pump up the stock value now even if they're bad for the company in the long run.)