I picked those examples because I could think of them off of the top of my head. But I fail to see why they don't count. Because they were founders? So what is your point, then? That if a CEO comes out of nowhere (which doesn't happen), and sits there doing nothing at an already established business he doesn't deserve the money? I agree, and so will the board of directors when they fire him and get him replaced. CEOs have to do something beneficial. And since they run the company their decisions and actions are going to million dollar decisions. It doesn't matter whether they were founders or not, or whether they can cover losses from the beginning.
If Zuckerberg had had a "million dollar parachute", but still came up with Facebook, would he not be deserving of money? Why is it a prerequisite that someone be poor (Zuckerberg wasn't poor anyways)? If an individual already personally makes millions, why can't they make their company millions?
Take Elon Musk. Using the success of PayPal, he has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla, using partly his own designs. He had a safety net, but SpaceX's success (which is groundbreaking) and Tesla's would not happen without him. If that pneumatic train idea works, he will have yet another successful business.
Heck, even Donald Trump who's no doubt an ass personality-wise still has made a ton of money for his various companies. He also started with a safety net.
Starting with your own personal safety net is no problem at all. But "golden parachute" refers to the huge sum of money that an executive gets as a reward for doing a shitty job. I once got two weeks' severance pay, and that was at a job with a six-digit salary. When I hear about people getting $15 million dollars for having their $30 million contract terminated early, I have to suspect that they weren't worth either the $30 million or the $15 million.
I'm just making a value judgment, not calling for legislative or any kind of correction (other than for boards of directors to use some fucking common sense). It just seems ludicrous that executives are so important to the success of a business that they can command to be paid huge sums
even when they fail. Someone starting with their own money to back them up? Not an issue. They already had that money one way or another. But no one is so important that they ought to be paid millions to fail, and paid even more millions when they get fired.
At the very least, I can't show a lot of admiration for what a hired executive "risks" when the reward for failure is so high. A founder of a business risks everything and deserves enormous rewards if successful.
Obviously Jobs was both kinds. When he returned to Apple he was paid only in Apple stock. The way Apple looked at that time, it was a huge risk but obviously paid off big. If he'd driven Apple into the ground, he would have gotten next to nothing.