The rise in CEO pay, and tying CEO pay to stock performance, are entirely orthogonal issues. The fact that the article doesn't seem to realize this distinction, makes me question how much of the rest of the article is similarly flawed.
You can pay someone the exact same target-compensation, while still shifting it away from cash, and towards stock. For example, giving someone a stock grant of 1000 shares of GOOG, instead of paying them $1.1M in cash.
There are still issues with this approach, although they're a bit more subtle. Think about Valeant circa 2015 -- definitely taking a short term approach of acquiring and stripping pharma companies, which did positively impact their stock price. But, they did it in an unsustainable manner.
