If you take a quarter for each person and give it to an executive as additional compensation, the executive will experience a 250/hr increase in pay given a 1000 employee company, and the individual will experience only a loss of 25 cents. Cut executive compensation by that much and they will leave. Heck, cut it by half as much and they will do so. Aside from that, research shows that executive compensation issues are down to the conflict of interest that boards and CEOs have, since the CEO hires the compensation analysts for the board. Hedge funds doing 'vulture capitalism' or stripping the equity from a company without a bias towards a going concern is not down to Jets. Its down to the regulatory environment incentivizing companies to do so.