The higher up you go the less work you do and the more stress you take on. You're essentially trading your peace of mind for more money.

When you work a simple manual labor job you clock in and clock out and then go home and live your life. Work stays at the office.

When you're an executive or a business owner you're working 100% of the time. Something happens, you need to respond. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions where you're fucked either way but you need to minimize damage.

You need to find solutions to problems and that keeps you up at night. Don't have enough money for payroll next week? How you gonna do it? Not pay vendors this week? Take out another line of credit at ridiculous rates? Skip a payment on your rent? Equipment financing?

You have to do something- you stop paying your employees and the company falls apart very quickly. Could start a chain reaction of good people leaving, making the situation worse. The buck pretty much stops with you, you can't pass off the problem to someone else.

It's not easy to be in charge. Lot of blame rests on your shoulders if things go wrong.

Of course that doesn't mean they deserve 10,000x the salary of a regular job. I think CEO pay should be capped to some multiple of regular employee pay. Whatever that scalar value should be 2, 5, or 10 I think is debatable. But it should be capped.

Small business owner here. Just to add to the other responses about the stress and responsibility as you move up that others mentioned here... I cover every one of my employees when they take vacation or sick leave. So I am often doing my job, plus another person's. It's not uncommon for me to work 12 hour days without breaks.