This is outside of our normal purview, but summer blogging is slow, so who cares? This line from the WSJ jumped out at me:

Four of the 10 highest-earning executives [of the past 10 years] ran companies whose shareholders lost money over the decade: IAC/InterActive, Countrywide, Capital One and Cendant Corp.

This includes 2 of the top 5-- guys pulling in $1.1 billion and $549 million respectively.

Sure, these are arbitrary samples taken from arbitrary time periods, and some of the other top paid execs did preside over companies that made huge profits for shareholders. But taking arbitrary samples wouldn't matter, and the numbers wouldn't be so far off (1.1 billion????) if exec pay was really tied to performance (or to "maximizing shareholder value").