Comment by sssilver

My understanding is that every employees compensation (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of “how different would the outcome for the shareholders be if this person was replaced with someone else”.

Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.

Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.

So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.