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Do you think most C-suite executives are over, under, or appropriately paid relative to the market value of their labor?
That seems a broad question. There are CEOs who are merely occupying a chair and collecting the salary. It happens in just about any position. There are also people who work their butts off innovating and improving life for the whole country who are taking risks to do so. I wouldn’t begrudge the second set a thing, and furthermore I think being keen to confiscate wealth on the theory that the first type is more common than the second ends up doing great harm as it prevents the second group from working effectively.
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Obviously overpaid. Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo for 239 million dollars, I would have gladly ruined it for 150 million. And there are people that would run it into the ground for a million and some for free.
This is outcome based thinking and basically one of the best ways to never truly understand why the world works the way it does. If you buy a game for $1 where a coin is flipped and you get $10 if it's a head then you did the right thing even if the coin flip turns up tails. The real life outcome is not important, what really matters is the expectation.
If you look at the very top Contract Bridge or Magic The Gathering players for example they evaluate their play based on expected values of the boardstate rather than whether that specific time what they did worked out well for them or not. The right play that led you to lose the round is not an issue at all while the wrong play that led you to win that specific time is something you need to fix ASAP.
Sure you can run Yahoo for $150M but for the board it makes more sense to pay Mayer $249M if there's say a 30% probability she ruins the company and a 70% probability she makes it good again vs paying you $150M for a 100% probability of the company being ruined, irrespective of what the final outcome of Mayer's tenure turns out to be.
Some of the things she did were just ridiculous:
It's not as though she made ambitious ploys that might've worked but failed due to bad luck, she had a scattergun approach of random nonsense. "We need to do something" -> "this is something" -> "therefore we must do this" x50. Mayer had a hard task but bungled massively.
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I think you can even switch those odds, it can be a hail marry, a 30% chance she turns it around. If you're a high end exec you're going to want to be heavily compensated for the risk that you're going to get fired and that possibly ending your career. "I'll try to patch up the Titanic but you're going to pay me enough that when it goes down I'm sitting on the life boat with a smile on my face."
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