I got my BA in organizational communication, so I feel that I can speak to this. There is definitely a direct correlation with the size of a company and the complexity of running the company. It gets compounded when your company is high profile like Wikipedia is because it winds up becoming political really quick, as stupid as that is. The only way to keep a company ‘not complicated’ is to keep it perfectly flat, which is impossible once you get up to around 25 employees, at which point the CEO is directly managing everyone and can’t do their job running the company.

Now the question of deserving to get paid more is pretty nuanced imo. Does a person deserve to be paid more because they work harder? If so, service industry workers should be some of the top paid people. Or should compensation be determined by impact to the companies bottom line? Or perhaps correlated with personal risk in the role? What about volume of work? Or difficulty of work? I don’t think it’s as simple as asking if they deserve it so much as asking what the company can pay and the value add the executive makes. But this is a bit of a blue sky scenario where there’s equity in how we pay people rather than this obscene good old boys club where executives all smell their own farts and pat each other on the back for doing so.

I do think that higher level positions with higher levels of responsibility (which will be different based on numerous factors, including size and complexity of the company) should be paid more than lower levels. But I also think there should be a cap on the wage disparity between the lowest and highest earners.

I don't think execs at bigger companies should be paid more because it's more complex, I think a big part of it is the pressure/stakes are higher because you have to answer to more employees/shareholders if you make the wrong decision.

In many cases their narcissistic personalities make this argument moot, but I wouldn't want to be responsible for decisions that affect the lives of thousands of employees.