Here's where you are wrong (to a degree) it is Big Oil that helped (supported) many of the regulations (over the past 30 years) on gas stations & petroleum operations that helped force out the independents.
Margins at the pump today are the best the gasoline industry has seen in decades (this with record high gas prices) - If the independents hadn't been forced out to the degree they have been.....they'd keep the pump price more honest.
You never saw such large and continuous fluctuations in the street price of gasoline like we've come to see in the past 3-5 years - That is because there aren't the Indy's out there to keep the price honest. The big guys are always immediately passing that price right to the consumer....they didn't have that luxury when their were more indy's.
And again, it was regulations to a large degree that forced the Indy's out of the business.
I'm not mad at this Exxon guys retirement package. Not in the sense that it is wrong or the Gov't belongs involved in stopping it (though it is curious that Gov't regulations certainly help reduce competition on many of the big boy industries???).
The problem is though CEO are more and more simply worried about the short term (make stock-holders happy for the next dividend ....and aren't always looking ahead far enough). The late 90's bust was due in some way to this type of thinking / management.
And that payment method was functionally mandated by Clinton's 1993 budget which financially punished companies for not linking their executive pay to stock prices.