A few years ago, I read a book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. And happier. Less anger, less resentment, less envy. More unity. More of a sense of “we,” not us vs. them.

We are now at the other extreme. Some people are paid sums they can never spend in 100 lifetimes.

This is unhealthy.

Jeff Sommer of The New York Times reported on the 10 richest people in America.

Even among the nation’s best-paid corporate chiefs, Elon Musk stands alone. His compensation last year was a mind-boggling $132.3 billion. That’s not just 2.5 million times what the typical Tesla employee made; it’s 153 times the compensation of the second-highest paid chief executive.

Dylan Field, who heads Figma, an online design platform, was runner-up to Mr. Musk in the rankings. But in terms of wealth created, he was way behind. His pay, $864.4 million, was a mere rounding error for Mr. Musk.

These astonishing figures come from the latest annual survey of the highest-paid chief executives conducted for The New York Times by the research firm Equilar. The study found that seven other chief executives of public companies had paydays last year of at least $100 million, more than ever before.

Median pay for the 100 highest-paid chief executives in publicly traded companies reached $39.4 million — a new peak, and a leap of 35.8 percent in just one year.

As an editor and as a columnist, I’ve been involved in these Equilar surveys since they started in 2007. They have always shown that chief executives in the United States are exceedingly well paid. But lately, the trend is starker.

Right after Mr. Field in the latest rankings was Shankh Mitra of Welltower, a real estate investment trust that focuses on health care, with compensation of $821 million. Welltower shareholders last month disapproved of that pay package in a rare negative vote. One critic called it an “egregiously management-friendly” transfer of wealth from shareholders. But the “say on pay” vote was nonbinding. A vast majority of such measures are approved at public companies every year.

In the 1950s, the gap between the pay of a typical employee and a CEO was 1-20. For every dollar a typical employee earned, a chief executive made twenty. This era was characterized by much narrower income disparity compared to recent decades. (Forbes)