no, founding a company does not make a person more virtuous or deserving of orders of magnitude more money than people who don't. even if we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had equal opportunity to do this, those people would not actually have a greater claim to a higher standard of living

It's not about virtue. Founding a company is a very risky endeavor, and more risk means more (potential) reward.

It's clear that Jobs was critical to Apple financial success. The abnormal clarity of his contributions would actually obscure the argument, though.

There are many more Ginni Romettys than Steve Jobs, how does one successfully apply this analysis in less obvious scenarios?

It's abundantly clear that CEO decisions make or break a company. That's why one doesn't want to scrimp in compensation offers to them. It costs you an extra million in compensation, but the CEO making the right decisions is worth far more than that.

Apple churned through several CEOs who did not make a difference.

How does one make an analysis? That's the game, indeed.

I think this is correct only for the right size of company. There’s also a long tail of businesses out there in the $10m to $100m range where the balance of responsibility between the C-suite and the top technical talent makes it much less clear that the two should diverge in comp quite so much. I suppose it’s ironic that the big tech companies are also the ones that give such big pie slices to their engineers, and the smallest businesses are the ones where the tech ICs are replaceable while the C-levels are uniquely brilliant.

How many businesses have we seen slowly fade away as the tech team ebbs one by one leaving only a remnant core of mostly non tech roles?

Mr. Bright, are you hawking coffee shops again ;-) [1] A bit reductive, innit? :-)

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542692