If you didn't know any better, you would think, have to think, that the CEO of companies such as Walmart, McDonalds, IBM, and so forth, that employ hundreds of thousands of employees would be the highest paid Executives on earth, and you would be wrong, by a very long shot. The fact of the matter is even though CEO pay is absolutely currently insane for so many of the largest public companies in America, to which their pay as reported by Fortune magazine was brought to light by the reality that: "the ratio between average American CEO pay and worker pay is now 303-to-1," and with huffingtonpost.com reporting that: "In 2014, CEO pay had risen to an average of $16,316,000 compared to only $53,200 for workers," you might think with that pay that the monetary compensation for CEOs of the most powerful corporations in the world is insurmountable by anyone else at anytime; this wouldn't even come close to the real truth, is not even in fact in the same picture frame, as the truly astronomical salaries of today's most highly paid hedge fund operators which are absolutely beyond belief. For instance, the Institutional Investor reported that the top paid hedge fund manager in 2014 and 2015 was Ken Griffin, who made $1.3 billion and $1.7 billion in each of those years, respectively, whereas in 2013, the highest paid hedge funder manager, David Tepper, made $3.5 billion, and the numbers of the rest of those in the top 25, in 2015, still are staggering, as the bottom man on that list made $100 million, whereas in comparison in 2015, there was only one CEO that crossed over $100 million, that being Charif Souki of Cheniere Energy. When it is all said and done, the average yearly CEO pay of an astonishing $16,316,000 in comparison to Ken Griffin's $1.7 billion indicates that Griffin's ratio to average yearly CEO pay is a stunning 104:1.
While hedge fund managers can talk all day about how they have "skin the game" as they invest their own money in their fund and further that nobody is forced to invest with them, and also that their returns on the money invested with them is stupendous, or whatever, even if it really isn't, the bottom line is that hedge fudge managers don’t actually produce anything, they make their money via leverage, arbitration, market inefficiencies, derivatives, information, sources, superior technological throughput, and whatever else that they can successfully exploit for their benefit, which means in a nutshell, that greed for them is very, very good.
All of the above might be okay, on some basic capitalistic level, but as always, the most powerful and richest people in the world, have unfairly gamed the system for their own benefit, and in this case, probably the most important asset to hedge fund managers, is the fact that their income is very tax efficient because of their ability to use the carried-interest category which allows their gains on investments to be treated as long-term capital gains at a much lower tax rate as opposed to the significantly higher tax rate of ordinary income, to which the likes of you suffer to pay via our hourly pay rate; in addition, they also make it policy to park their assets outside the USA via reinsurance and hence defer profits from any taxation till repatriated back to the United States.
While CEOs of major corporations are in the business of actually providing a desirable product to customers throughout the world, and subsequently are running companies that provide a valued good or service, hedge fund managers are simply in the business of making money on money, for the sake of making money, while providing nothing of real merit, nothing of real value to society at large, nothing real but their profits at the world's expense.