CEOs often do real work for a company, people who sit on a board don’t. Board directors are often on the boards of several companies, because being on one board alone is not nearly hard enough to qualify being a job in and of itself.
These people rake in money as if each of those board seats were a super job, effectively equivalent to hundreds or thousands of workers, while it requiring no where near the level of effort or expertise that an actual job requires.
Capitalism isn’t meritocratic like pro-capitalists love to believe. Capitalism is a system designed for and by the owner class to protect said property owning class.
If you want a meritocracy, you want a market socialist system. It’ll still have some problems capitalism has by the nature of markets (externalized costs aren’t accounted for by markets), but it’s at least a proper meritocracy when renting humans is illegal like buying them already is.