Physicality is far more measurable in its results than the product of a thousands strong multi-national company.
In other words one can pretty clearly attribute the performance of an athlete to said athletes talents and ability. In the case of the CEO making the same money, it's much harder to measure their performance, and even harder to attribute the success of the company to their direct performance. This point becomes even more true as companies grow in scale, such as Google has done.
That doesn’t mean that their performance can’t significantly affect their companies stock price to a much higher degree than similarly paid athletes could.
> Physicality is far more measurable
Who cares. Do you believe that only people whose output could be precisely measured should be highly compensated?
Of course there is a lot of inefficiency considering Pichai seems to be a very poor CEO who’s quite replaceable.
In other words one can pretty clearly attribute the performance of an athlete to said athletes talents and ability. In the case of the CEO making the same money, it's much harder to measure their performance, and even harder to attribute the success of the company to their direct performance. This point becomes even more true as companies grow in scale, such as Google has done.