Time and again, we see CEOs and similar executives make horrible decisions that massively damage a company both financially and in terms of reputation and the perpetrator is forced to resign, yet receives so much money as a going away present you’d think they’re being rewarded for their fuck up. Why??
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo was a good example of this; she was a young rockstar VP at Google and could have easily held out for the top job at a bigger / healthier company (or even Google itself), but she took Yahoo’s money, failed spectacularly, and got paid $239M for, essentially, giving up her chance to ever be CEO of a big tech company again.