The whole discussion of executive compensation seems, like so many discussions these days, to have gone a bit off the rails.  The point is not whether an executive is being paid X number of dollars or whether the figure X is Y times the wage of the average worker within the firm, though the second question here is fodder for a discussion all its own.  The real crux of the issue is moral hazard.

The issue is that executives, especially within the realm of finance, are increasingly compensated for taking considerable risks in the hope of short-term gains, while being divorced from the down-side risk of loss.  On the one hand, they stand to make their firms, and thusly the firm's shareholders, a lot of money in the short-term.  On the other hand, they stand to lose their firms and respective shareholders a lot of money.  Given the risks in question, the probability of the second outcome is frequently more likely.

What are the incentives for executives?  If their gambles pay off, they stand to be compensated very handsomely.  If the gambles do not pay off, they stand to be compensated handsomely.  Huh?

In many cases, especially at top firms, executives who bust may find themselves looking for other work, but their dismissal frequently comes with a stellar severance package.  These same executives are frequently hired by competing firms.

In an ideal system, shareholder governance would be far less irrelevant than it apparently is, but we're obviously not living with such a system.  The topic of shareholder governance, which is laughably weak in the contemporary environment, is a topic to be explored in another post.

The issue at hand is not the level of compensation for executives, but rather the particular behavior that said compensation incentivizes, namely making bad bets with other people's money.  In the world of the too-big-to-fail institution, where institutions that pose systemic risk are an undeniable reality, this is an unacceptable status quo.