The average public CEO now makes nearly 400 times more than the average American as their pay has increased by an average of 1,460% since 1978.

Now you probably already know the old joke that… no they are not working 400 times harder than their employees.

But being a CEO is still a serious commitment that normally involves making life long sacrifices to climb the corporate ladder or start a successful business all while being constantly accountable to shareholders and a board of directors.

The pay is good, but the work is hard, and if you want to be CEO, you need to be on call 24/7 to put out fires, or your time at the top will be very short-lived.

That's the story anyway. So then what is behind the massive rise in CEO's that only work part time, if they show up to work at all?

Fired this morning after the company offered a private jet to its new CEO instead of relocating to Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, incoming CEO Brian Niccol will be commuting from his home in Newport Beach, California.

I never wanted to be an engineer. I never wanted to be a programmer. I never wanted to start a company. I had an idea and I wanted to build it and I did whatever it took to build it.

Elon Musk is a controversial figure, but love him or hate him, the one thing that nobody has been able to take away from him is that he works incredibly hard.

That was until recently, when people started to notice that the man has been playing an awful lot of Diablo 4.

According to other players, he would have had to spend as much as 17 hours a day playing the game to reach the levels he has shown off in various live streams.

Now it is possible the world's richest man could have paid someone else to play video games for him.

But a potential Diablo addiction aside, it did raise questions about how any mortal man could possibly be an effective chief executive at SpaceX and Tesla when he also has a full-time role at four other major companies.

Even seasoned executives have to dedicate enormous amounts of their time to running just one company.

The reality is that Elon Musk is far from the worst offender of a major company CEO showing up to their job less than you do.

Brian Niccol is the newly appointed CEO of Starbucks. To join the company, he was offered a sign-on bonus which could be worth as much as $113 million within his first year.

Now some of that bonus was to compensate him for the stock options he will be giving up by leaving his previous job as the CEO of Chipotle.

But it's still a record-breaking package which is especially generous when you consider that the man won't even be moving to the same state as his new company's HQ.

He will instead be permitted to work remotely from his current home in Newport Beach and will be allowed to commute using the company's private jet when he has to be in the office.

Oh, yeah, and in case you were wondering, yes, Starbucks and its remote CEO did introduce a returned office mandate for all of its lesser office staff.

Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, rarely showed up to the company's offices, allegedly spending most of his time at his other company Block.

Just last month, it was announced that the new CEO of Victoria's Secret would also be allowed to work remotely so that they didn't have to move to the company's HQ in Columbus Ohio.

And yes, Victoria's Secret has also made it mandatory for everybody else to work from the office.

There are tens of thousands of highly qualified candidates that would kill to be the CEO of one of these companies, so the hiring board can be picky with who they choose to hire.

So then why are these top employees allowed to work from home and dedicate their time to a second or third job when doing the same thing would get anybody else fired?

Well, there are actually three reasons and they are each more disappointing than the last. The first is that CEOs have become little more than a cheerleader for their company.

Brian Niccol's offer to join Starbucks may sound obscene, but to the board of directors and current shareholders, it's so far actually been a pretty prudent investment.

Since his announcement, the company's value has shot up by over $20 billion on the news, which means investors just see that his astronomical pay package has covered itself 20 times over.

The new investors buying in also know that no matter how brilliant Niccol might be as a chief executive, he is not single-handedly going to be able to turn the company around or individually going to add $20 billion in valuation by himself.

The actual reason why so many new investors bought in upon the announcement of the new CEO was because of what he represents.

Niccol in particular has built a reputation of being an absolute hard-ass against unionization efforts and someone who is quite good at reinvigorating brand image. The new CEO is obviously a master at public relations as well.

Because if you Google his name and union, the only thing you will find is an identical article from about 20 different outlets, all reporting on his announcement that he was willing to engage with workers, whatever that means.

But for investors, declining brand appeal and the union efforts are the issues facing the company.

So appointing someone to do the job who has become infamous for fixing these issues is a display that the company is taking these issues seriously.

A better example might be someone like Musk. He now has as much or more brand presence as the company that he leads.

A lot of his business's actual success may have very well been achieved by the engineers and level-headed executives working behind the scenes.

But he is at least partially responsible for employing those people in the first place, so now he has a reputation as a serial entrepreneur that builds the businesses of the future, a very appealing pitch to investors.

Even old Dorsey of Twitter, who apparently hated his job as CEO, presented an image that aligned with the company's investment pitch as an alternative communications channel that like democratizes information man.

This is all a relatively new phenomenon. Even 20 years ago, people didn't know big company CEOs unless they were extremely high-profile founders.

Do you know who the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lily or ExxonMobil is? Unless you are an industry insider or highly informed investor, probably not.

But thanks to social media, new marketing techniques and a new cultural interest in business and finance, CEOs, especially CEOs of modern consumer facing companies,

are just as much influencers for their businesses as they are are someone performing executive functions day to day.

Do you know who the CEOs of Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Nvidia, or Tesla is? Even if you don't care about business that much, you probably do.

And that's because these men have become just as important to these companies marketing strategy as celebrity endorsements and advertising campaigns.

Now some of these men still work incredibly hard in addition to being a spokesperson for their company.

But for some of them, it's become possible to offload the boring work onto other employees and spend the rest of their time elsewhere. And for a lot of companies, that may very well be for the best.