I'm gonna preface this: Microsoft can go fuck themselves, they are easily the shittiest company out of the three console manufacturers. So this is not any sort of targeted defense. Additionally, I hope all of those that have been laid off in this recent wave of large company layoffs (which I was a part of as well not too long ago) can find their feet quickly and find some work soon.
However, this antagonistic view towards executives as a whole is just very misguided and pretty wrong.
Maybe not in the case of Blizzard or Activision, but most higher up executives (CFO, CEO, etc) have to absolutely work their fuckin ass off 24/7 to the point where work becomes their life. Constantly making connections, attending events (where the goal is not to have fun, its to sweeten up a deal for a potential client), flying out, reviewing projections and forecasts, presenting, dealing with regulatory bodies, etc. It is far more stressful, and requires far more patience and experience, than most people at the bottom of any business. Sorry, that is the truth. Its not just a bunch of rich people dicking around doing nothing counting money all day while the poor people at the bottom toll away, that's the Hollywood bullshit version of it. When these executives get their "bonus" (which is also ignoring that these bonuses are usually a drop in the bucket compared to 2,000+ people's salaries, even in the case of the Sting concert, $500,000 is complete chump change to a company like Microsoft, even if they didn't do it thats maybe 10 people's yearly salaries and thats a hard lowball for their salaries, but again salaries are not accounted in even nearly the same way as organizing events so its a meaningless comparison), its not at the expense of people's jobs, thats not how accounting for these companies work at all, its because they actually need to have some sort of incentive to put up with all the insane amount of crap they deal with on a daily basis. If not, they would pretty much all immediately leave and go elsewhere, which presents a massive problem if the "people that do all the work", actually WANT to have work.
Its significantly more balanced than you think, the staff and management are definitely working hard and they deserve their proper compensation, but at the end of the day the executives are usually the ones actually busting their asses the hardest. If they are doing a genuinely good job, they are the ones making sure the staff and management actually have the ability to work in the first place. Of course, you can be like Embracer and have moronic as shit executives, which yea, they can go fuck themselves. Or be a creep like Bobby Kotick. But as someone who has worked with genuinely good executives and works in a field that regularly front-faces with them, it is extremely far from the truth to suggest executives basically get away with murder while everyone under them gets treated like shit.
