CEO salaries

To most people the initials CEO refer to the head of a large corporation such as those in the Fortune 500 but there are 1.5 million corporations in the USA. Referring to the top five hundred the average pay is $10 million which is 20 times more than the average employee but the difference does not end there. Here is the tale of two CEO's. John Hess has been CEO of Hess Corporation since 1996 and last year his salary was $12 million. The number of employees at Hess has declined from 12,000 in 2013 to 2,000 today. Last year Hess posted a loss of $1.1 billion. Jeff Bezos has headed Amazon since its inception in 1995 and his salary is $1.7 million and the number of employee has risen from a few to 566,000 while profits last year were $1.8 billion. Salaries of CEO's are not indicative of their contribution to the country.