The amount of money America CEOs make has been called obscene. It is often many hundred times what their employees earn. The trend has been particularly criticized at public corporations that pay people little more than the locally mandated minimum wage. This has included, in the recent past, such operations as McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Walmart.

The median CEO pay at America’s largest companies jumped again in 2021. The Harvard Law School Forum On Corporate Governance reported that, across a sample of chief executive pay, based on SEC filings, the sum called “total direct compensation” reached $14.3 million. That was up from $12 million in 2020. That amount is minimal compared to the compensation paid to one American CEO, who made almost $247 million last year. That chief executive was Discovery’s David Zaslav, who racked up $246,573,481 including base pay, bonuses, stock option grants, and short-term incentives.

The groups most often criticized for such stratospheric pay levels are the corporate boards that set CEO pay. Many board members make large amounts of money themselves, particularly for the hours they put in. A director at a large company can make several hundred thousand dollars for a year’s worth of service.

…MyLogIQ, which examines public company documents using machine learning and artificial intelligence, recently looked at the CEO pay at large companies in the S&P 500. A number of America’s best-known companies made the list, including Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Walt Disney, and Visa – though none of them paid their chief executives as well as Discovery.