CEOs in the US buy back stock a lot these days. That naturally raises the price and doesn’t take a lot of skill or vision. Maybe it is a good idea (it depends) but do you really need to give out lavish compensation when you can manipulate the price?
No they don't. Boards buy back stock. CEOs cannot realistically buy back company stock themselves. I mean, Iger only made $3million in cash, so this would be a losing strategy for him.
Adam Sandler earned $39.5 million to produce some mediocrity. We should obviously make that illegal, right?
So if you run a $223 billion company like Disney, you should earn 1/20th what Adam Sandler does to squeeze out a few bad movies for Netflix.
How about running a trillion dollar company like Microsoft, one of the most important companies in world history and critical to the US economy? Satya Nadella should probably earn less than Simon Cowell, #64 on the Forbes list at $43.5 million in earnings.
Why does Lebron James get to earn $85.5 million? The retort will always be: because James is worth it.
So is an elite CEO running a massive company. The reality is that today these are normal earnings figures for people operating in elite positions where enormous economic value is in play. People in these pay arguments always intentionally devalue the knowledge, experience and skill that is required to operate a company the scale of Disney (that's how they can lay out the premise with a straight face that average worker pay to CEO pay should be low): it's one of the most difficult jobs on earth, and far more difficult and challenging than anything Jimmy Garoppolo will ever do on a football field.
The average Lakers employee isn't worth 1/1000th what Lebron James is to the franchise. The average worker is not worth 1/1000th what Iger is to Disney. That's entirely correct economic math. It's that reality that irrationally upsets almost everyone, because they like to pretend it takes only modest knowledge, experience and skill to operate something like Disney, when in fact being able to do it well is a more rare talent than what the typical elite athlete represents. It's excused in sports only because supposedly that's easier to measure (and yet it still doesn't change the fact that Lebron James earns so much more than the typical worker in the Lakers organization).
That's the difference between CEO pay and literally every other example you've given here. In each of those other examples, the business is directly and measurably extracting value from the person getting all that money.
It's far more abstract for a CEO, and it's far harder to separate their contributions from "what would've happened regardless".
A team gives him a specific amount of money to perform a very specific task, which is 'perform on a basketball court'. The team paying him believes that his performance will draw in fans and money to outweigh what they're paying him.
Netflix didn't pay Adam Sandler for 'thought leadership'. They paid him to deliver a certain number of films, which they know that they can extract a certain amount of value from.
The only way to measure executive leadership is the impact they've had on a company's valuation, and that impact cannot be as clearly tied to a single person as Lebron James' performance on the court, or Adam Sandler's (admittedly surprising given how bad his last several movies have been) star power.