Companies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.

If one person at the top of the pyramid earns 100 times what people at the bottom earn, cutting a few of them is still meaningful. Also, cutting a single/few person(s) that are mismanaging the whole organization is extraordinarily valuable too.

But salaries - sorry, operational costs - are an inverted pyramid.