The risk is that all google failures, whether simply perceived or real, are publicly attributed to him. This is real and is one of many factors that influences the willingness of qualified candidates to seek CEO roles in the first place, let alone of very large, very well known companies. But it is certainly not the only factor, and it’s not even a very significant factor in most cases, when it comes to determining CEO comp.
The real people who “take all the risk” are the investors (and they obviously don’t take “all” the risk). Somehow this platitude started getting applied to executives, but that has always been based on a misunderstanding of how executive comp is typically structured.
