I find the idea that there should be a cap on somebody's earning potential truly bizarre.
Let's take the CEO of Barclays - his basic is £2.7m, and with benefits and bonuses has the potential to receive an additional £6.7m.
I accept these are eye-watering amounts to 99.9% of the population, but he will be commanding that sort of money because he must be very good at what he does, but to suggest this is "unfair" is ridiculous. It's a fact of life that some people do better in life than others - so what.
But let's take Sunny-Dave's (ridiculous) idea of capping his salary to 20x the lowest paid employee. The average salary of a new cashier is £18k, so Mr Venkatakrishnan's salary would be limited to £360k. Clearly if Mr Venkatakrishnan can command his salary, which would have been ratified by the Barclays remuneration committee and the shareholders, capping it to £360k would quickly result in him plying his trade elsewhere.
Somebody mentioned on this thread that if CEOs take a paycut, the money could be shared among the employees. In Mr Venkatakrishnan's case his basic would reduce by £2.34m which, would give each of the 88,400 employees an additional £26.47 a year, a massive 51p a week.
People getting prissy about CEO pay do so out of jealousy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-23/barclays-ceo-took-salary-cut-when-he-replaced-staley-in-top-job#:~:text=His%20fixed%20pay%20for%202022,according%20to%20calculations%20by%20Bloomberg.