What's extra insane about the google one, Pichai's salary of 225m divided over the 10k workers fired is a staggering 22.5k/yr. If you assume the average tech salary of a remote google employee is somewhere in the 50k-100k range, that's 2.5k-5k / 10k workers that could have been saved by cutting Pichai instead.
Forget societal ethics, how do you justify to shareholders cutting ten thousand salaries worth of jobs and giving half the money to the CEO?
This feels like one of those weird game theory problems where you have to solve for the minimum amount you would have to pay to ensure no one bothers to stop you.
It's... Not really the same thing, because being the CEO of the company ties the hands behind his back if he wants to actually use his stock compensation.
Edit: for any Google SWE making <100k, just move to the US, man. The pay is so much higher it's not even funny.
Comparing pay from one country to another is a lot harder than just looking at the numbers. Earning 100k$ in the US is not the same as earning 100k$ in Poland for example