CEO’s and Apple behave like this for two reasons: one, the $450 million payout comes from suckers in the stock market, lied to and fooled that Apple is a reputable company. The money isn’t earned in the traditional sense, there’s never any screaming that $450 million were taken out of cash revenues of the company. Two, until very recently under American accounting rules that $450 million wasn’t even expensed as a cost!
Normally $450 million in CEO compensation would be subtracted from Apple’s profit statement at the end of the year, but since they were options, incredibly, $450 million would never appear on the books as the compensation payout it is. Free money from the market, free money in accounting. A setup like that was irresistible to thousands of CEO’s who abused it terribly, netting vast fortunes for literally nothing.