Leave it to Ari Emanuel, the founder and head of the newly-public Endeavor Group Holdings, to get the headlines for being the highest-paid executive in Hollywood last year, with a total package clocking in at $308 million, most of which is a long-term equity grant that only has value if Emanuel supercharges the Endeavor stock price. That’s probably exactly what he wanted. But Ari is hardly the only mediaco C.E.O. making bank. David Zaslav made nearly $247 million last year, a figure that is also tied heavily to stock performance. Bobby Kotick made more than $150 million (and will make plenty more once the Microsoft acquisition of Activision goes through). 2021 will likely be remembered on Wall Street as the peak of a financial bubble that will take years to unwind.

Of course, ridiculous levels of compensation, however complex their structure, aren’t limited to Hollywood C.E.O.s. Loyal readers know that I’ve been appalled by Larry Culp’s $120 million stock award gambit at GE, perhaps the most egregious example of corporate greed to come down the pike in a long while. After all, Culp helped himself to the stock award by getting the GE board of directors to reset the bar lower for him when the getting was good in August 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, despite the fact that the GE stock price hasn’t budged during his more than three years at the helm of the company.