Leaders Were Supposed to Eat Last. We Let the Market Eat First.

The Principle That Leaders Should Sacrifice for Those They Lead Has Been Inverted by Shareholder Primacy

The principle that leaders should sacrifice for those they lead – leaders eat last – has been inverted by shareholder primacy. CEOs of Europe's top 100 companies now earn 110 times more than average workers, while mass layoffs continue alongside record stock buybacks. This isn't a failure of individual character but of institutional design. The question for Europe: can a different model of corporate governance restore the social contract that markets have consumed?

This tension between leadership as service and leadership as extraction is precisely what Europe's founders, policymakers, and builders will confront at Human x AI Europe on May 19 in Vienna – where the question isn't abstract but urgent.

The Ritual and Its Inversion

In the United States Marine Corps, there is a ritual so embedded it requires no order. When Marines gather to eat, the most junior are served first. The most senior take their place at the back of the line. As Simon Sinek observed

Stand in any corporate headquarters today and notice what happens to this principle. The ritual has been inverted. The most senior eat first – and they eat more than anyone imagined possible.

According to the European Trade Union Confederation, CEOs of Europe's top 100 companies received average remuneration of €4,147,440 in 2024 – 110 times more than the average worker's €37,863. In the United States, the disparity is even starker: the Economic Policy Institute reports that CEOs were paid 281 times as much as typical workers in 2024, compared to just 21 times in 1965.

This isn't a failure of individual character. It's a failure of institutional design. And the artifact that reveals this failure most clearly is the doctrine of shareholder primacy – the idea that a corporation's sole responsibility is to maximize returns for shareholders, regardless of the damage caused by earning that profit.

The Architecture of Extraction

The numbers tell a story, but the story is about something more than numbers. It's about what has been naturalized – made to seem inevitable, even rational.

The AFL-CIO's Executive Paywatch documents that average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies reached $18.9 million in 2024, a 7% increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, TechCrunch's layoff tracker shows that more than 118,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2025 alone, with companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Amazon each cutting over 14,000 positions.

The juxtaposition is not accidental. The Institute for Policy Studies' Executive Excess 2025 report found that the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay spent $644 billion on stock buybacks between 2019 and 2024. Lowe's alone spent $46.6 billion on share repurchases during this period – enough to fund an annual $28,456 bonus for each of its 273,000 employees. Instead, its CEO received $20.2 million, 659 times the median worker's pay.

This is what shareholder primacy looks like in practice: not a neutral market mechanism but a moral architecture that determines who eats first and who goes hungry.

The European Question

Europe has historically maintained a different relationship between corporations and society. The stakeholder model – embedded in German codetermination laws, in Nordic labor traditions, in the EU's social market economy – assumes that corporations exist within a web of obligations to workers, communities, and the environment.

But this model is under pressure. As Martin Lipton of Wachtell Lipton observed, the doctrine of shareholder primacy has "wreaked havoc on American public companies," creating "myopic demands for short-termist corporate policies and practices, including enormous pressure on companies to increase profits on a quarter-to-quarter basis, to engage in large share buybacks, and to sacrifice the interests of employees and other stakeholders."

The question for Europe is whether it will import this architecture or build something different.

Research from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth argues that shareholder primacy is "at the root of growing wealth inequality" and has driven "a focus on ruthless cuts to employee costs by business leaders." When people do not experience democracy at work, the argument goes, they may be less likely to prioritize democratic participation in the political process.

This is not merely an economic observation. It's a cultural diagnosis.

What the Artifact Reveals

Consider what happens when shareholder primacy is weakened. A 2025 study from the European Corporate Governance Institute examined Nevada's 2017 law change, which explicitly rejected shareholder primacy. The results were sobering: governance quality deteriorated, environmental and social performance declined, and executive pay increased while pay-performance sensitivity decreased.

The lesson is not that shareholder primacy should be preserved. The lesson is that weakening it without introducing credible accountability mechanisms leads to worse outcomes for everyone – shareholders and stakeholders alike. The Nevada experiment shows that loosening legal guardrails does not automatically produce stakeholder-friendly governance. It produces entrenchment.

This is the design challenge Europe faces: how to build institutions that hold leaders accountable to those they serve, not just to abstract market mechanisms.

The Cost of Leadership

Sinek's original insight remains relevant: "The cost of leadership is self-interest." In biological terms, leaders get the first pick of food and other spoils, but at a cost. When danger is present, the group expects the leader to mitigate all threats even at the expense of their personal well-being.

The modern corporation has severed this bargain. Leaders receive the spoils without bearing the costs. When danger arrives – in the form of market downturns, technological disruption, or pandemic – it is workers who are sacrificed first.

A 2025 Senate report documented this pattern explicitly: Amazon, which made $59.2 billion in profits, laid off 27,000 people while telling staff that AI "will reduce our total corporate workforce." Walmart cut 70,000 jobs over five years while increasing revenues by $150 billion. UnitedHealth Group offered buyouts to reduce its workforce by at least 30,000 while its CEO made $26.3 million.

The market ate first. The workers ate what remained.

Toward a Different Architecture

The question is not whether to have markets or not to have markets. The question is what values markets encode and who they serve.

Proposals for stakeholder capitalism suggest that fiduciaries should be required to consider economic, social, and environmental effects of their decisions on the interests of their beneficiaries. This would mean institutional investors using their authority to further the broad interests of human shareholders – not just financial returns at individual companies.

The EU's minimum wage directive, which requires member states to ensure at least 80% of the workforce are covered by collective bargaining agreements, represents one approach. The German model of worker representation on corporate boards represents another.

But these are defensive measures. What Europe needs is a positive vision: an architecture of leadership that restores the original bargain. Leaders eat last because they bear the costs of leadership. They sacrifice their own comfort for the good of those in their care.

This is not nostalgia. It's design.

The Thought That Lingers

In the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, bonuses go to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that they may gain.

The inversion is complete. But inversions can be reversed.

The artifact of shareholder primacy – like any artifact – reveals the values of its makers. It was designed. It can be redesigned. The question is whether Europe has the will to build institutions that encode a different set of values: that leaders serve those they lead, that corporations exist within webs of obligation, that markets are tools rather than masters.

The answer will determine not just economic outcomes but the texture of daily life – whether people experience their workplaces as sites of dignity or extraction, whether they feel protected or exposed, whether they believe the system works for them or against them.

Leaders were supposed to eat last. The market ate first. What happens next is a choice.