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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

The average CEO doesn’t even earn close to $1 million annually. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median CEO pay is $189,520 [1], less than most FAANG software engineers.

What you’re looking at here are CEOs of the top 500 companies..of course they’ll earn much more than the average.

I don’t see anyone complaining that Beyoncé gets millions of dollars per performance while the average musician earns pittance. It’s the same here. It’s news orgs chasing clickbait to make money from the naive and perpetually outraged.

1- https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm

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> I don’t see anyone complaining that Beyoncé gets millions of dollars per performance while the average musician earns pittance.

It would be a legitimate position to take. The system sustaining Beyoncé revenue is approximately the same one which is used to justify star CEO revenues.

The interesting question isn’t is it expected that top CEO will earn more than average CEO anyway. It’s why has the gap between the salary of top CEO and their average worker grew so much in the past 50 years. It’s a legitimate question to ask.

> It would be a legitimate position to take. The system sustaining Beyoncé revenue is approximately the same one which is used to justify star CEO revenues.

Ah yes. The "system" of buyers (music consumers, corporate boards) choosing to buy or not to buy things at the prices the sellers are willing to sell them at. What is your remedy for this?

There is no need for quote here. The entertainment industry works on heavy marketing and over promotion of a few champions at the expense of every other artists. That’s indeed a system. The market is both about what is bought and what is sold.

I personally feel perfectly fine with strongly curbing the free market with legislations. It’s not the be all end all nor is it working particularly well.

Mass media geared towards easy entertainment successfully erased decades of effort into educating the workers and creating structures to give them a voice. I personally view the entertainment industry as fully complicit in a general dumbing down of the population. Should we applaud the opium peddlers in the name of the free market?

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