Greenberg wasn't just a CEO. He is also a financial architect. He built AIG into an insurance giant that became so big, so entangled with Wall Street, that when it collapsed the government stepped in with a bailout package rather than see every bank in the country fail. The bailout package didn't make anyone happy. Even at $180bn, it kept AIG barely alive. It didn't punish the company: somehow the don't-screw-this-up-again bailout enabled many AIG employees to keep getting million-dollar bonuses, including $165m to executives who had left the company in 2009. Benmosche, who earned $6m in his own bonus package last year, compared the criticism of the employees' pay to " lynch mobs ". On the great moral scale most people understand, AIG won a prize from the government: rather than failing and spending years in bankruptcy while destroying the financial system, the company survived. Any value the company has is better than zero.