The STOCKHOLDERS are the OWNERS of the company: the CEO is merely an employee.
He (she) gets paid EXACTLY what the shareholders want.
He (she) gets paid EXACTLY what the shareholders want.
That's the way it is supposed to work. The question is does it? There is a strong argument to be made that managers (in the corporate setting, and bureacrats in the government setting) are the West's "New Class", to use Milovan Djilas's term which he applied to commisars.
Too many proxies are voted by 'institutional investors' and thus really by managers rather than the actual owners--the mutual fund investors and vested pension fund beneficiaries. Professional managers float in and out of corporate boards. If professional managers act as a class (or an 'old boy network' if you don't want to hijack the Marxist term), and look out for each other, rather than acting as fiduciaries for the stockholders for whom they in theory work, then CEO compensation is determined not by the owners, but by other managers (those on the board, those managing mutual funds, pension funds, . . .) The abusive cases that prompted the article at the head of the thread strongly suggest that this may be the case.