No one’s talking about pegging the salaries of the researchers who are in a completely different class than executive management. It’s a Straw Man argument.

The disdain for execs is apparent.

Most engineers can’t scale companies. Just take a look at the wasteland of personal projects demo’ed on HN. Great technical execution, but they don’t get off the ground as a profit generating company.

And a company scaled to to billions of dollars is even more of an outlier. It’s absolutely a skill.

Notice that I didn’t say anywhere that executives shouldn’t be paid more than workers. It’s a question of how much more. Right now executives make over 200 times more than an average worker, at a rate that’s increased more rapidly than workers wages. You can find a lot of economists who think this actually isn’t that great for the economy.

And yes, you can have a conversation of what value an exec brings vs the value generated by scientists inventing the products their selling. But the original point was that no one is coming after workers salaries — they’re not the ones making $15m a year.

That seems to suggest that somehow everyone's earnings is unlimited assuming they do extra work and train in whatever vocation they want, when we all know that isn't the case. Why is it that the markets cap is more virtuous than one that's good for society?

It actually is the case. Trick is that it's strongly modulated by randomness (luck).

There are no billionaire janitors, drycleaners, or chefs. I don't think there are even any billionaire software developers, doctors, or lawyers. There ARE billionaire business owners of all those things, but for the vocations themselves, it doesn't matter how good at that particular thing you are, you can't earn unlimited wealth strictly off those vocation specific skills and hard work unless you pivot and move your time and effort into something else.