For forty years, from the 1940s through the ’70s, the compensation of the top three executives of the largest companies had increased modestly, less than 1 percent a year, from the equivalent of $1.4 million on average to $1.8 million. Then it suddenly went crazy, particularly during the 1990s, so that by the early 2000s, those executives were receiving an average of $13 million a year. In the 2010s the average compensation of the five hundred highest-paid executives of public companies was $30 million.
