Those other people - with the exception of maybe Justin Gatlan - make a far more modest salary. It's less than a 1% difference in performance that leads to orders of magnitudes differences in outcomes.
Later down the career path in Canada, I was frequently asked "you worked for guy A and B, than must've been hell of a job?" or "how I got there to begin with?" All of them dismiss my explanation that "I just used to be on line 1 of google for thing A"
The back side of the coin? The moment web 2.0 became a more of an "in-house" production with mid-to-big sized companies that no longer needed a "hired gun" outsider, and hype wave moved to other things I really hit a wall. Actually, on my next 2 jobs I took salary in $70ks and was contemplating selling major life assets after my last employer in Canada was unable to extend my work permit.
Things went much better after I scaled down my appetites and stopped looking for employment with companies obsessed with "rockstar hiring"
Whereas if a name in the entertainment business has 3 times the audience draw as another you could make a pretty good stab at what their relative worth should be.
Whatever they can negotiate, in my view.
The effect of this being that all late-night talk show hosts are always subject to a direct financial comparison (but fortunately for their audience is sticky and belongs to them personally not to the television network). With top AI researchers, there's no real comparison or stack ranking, it's all about passing a certain bar which is objectively evident based on their past work, at least as long as AI is hot.
That's maybe half correct at best. Jay Leno could only take a small portion of his audience with him from the Tonight Show, if he chose to set up a competitor show. The same is currently true about Fallon, and likely far worse in his case today. Conan could never match his audience potential as host of the Tonight Show (pretty much no matter what he does, and certainly not on cable at TBS), because of the value of that specific platform, built up over decades and given its prominence on NBC.
A very large share of the Tonight Show audience, stays with the Tonight Show, regardless of host (barring the next Johnny Carson abandoning the show, or a truly horrendous product implosion at the current show). That audience largely belongs to Comcast NBC.
If Jimmy Kimmel leaves ABC, he would be replaced. Kimmel would struggle given the limited options, ABC would simply plop the next Kimmel into his spot and move on, with a large percentage of the same audience giving the next person a try.
Craig Ferguson's audience did not go with him, as another example.
It takes mental energy to watch stand-up comedy. If it's not funny, I've wasted mental energy in watching them and trying to get the jokes, so I generally only watch the names I know.
While many stand-ups may be funny, it takes a lot of work for them to get the name-recognition required to actually draw a large crowd.
Agreed RE Colbert - it almost feels like wathing a totally different comic (it kinda is - he's playing a whole different bit now and his fake-pundit style had years to grow and develop).
Struggling to bring this back to AI...agreed we're off-topic here :)
But what about your analysis which is based on unit economics. How does that tie in? (because it is of course relevant) By the fact that if you hire lots of super stars by market price, but your unit economic does not allow the operation to be profitable, you will eventually have to shut the operation down. Good bye super stars and whole operation!
The point I am trying to make here is that these figures vary from industry to industry and from job to job, I could have conversely changed these numbers around and shown that it doesn't make sense to pay Conan a huge multiple of the no-name comic's pay. For example, if the revenue does not increase substantially (like from 1M to 2M) or if the salary of the person in question makes up a much larger portion of the overall expense of the company.