It takes a lot of talent, hard work, and luck to be a successful bank CEO if you play by the rules. The invest imprudently while the sun is shining is a much easier strategy to pull off.
You become the CEO of a small regional bank. You can draw small regional bank pay for several years until they find someone else to be caretaker or you can invest imprudently, massively expand the size of the bank and be a growth CEO with growth CEO pay until the whole thing blows up.
Selling your equity compensation for even bigger returns.
Compensation packages for CEOs are structured such that most of the money is at risk equity grants.
They’d be nuts to lose tens of millions of equity in exchange for their base + bonus.