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I'm aware that Musk has multiple ventures. I'm also sure people are aware that higher taxes would affect people like Shotwell.
My point is that people act like more wealth maps out to more contribution to society. Rather than:
I would say usually they organized the labor and provided the material to the people who created many of the good things in society. That organizing the labor has value, but so does actually performing the labor. There's an entire chain of work to building a rocket, from organizing the labor to designing the rocket to producing the parts to sweeping the floors. Each of them deserves some of the cut of success, but who decides the amount? The answer is the people with resources.
The trick to this is that the contribution of the guy sweeping the floors is anchored by society's expectations. When setting the salary of janitor positions they look at the going rate. Meaning that even if they generate $50,000 in profit from having a janitor vs not having one, they can get away with only paying $25,000 by not competing. And the guy with nothing to his name has far less leverage to hold out for more.
That's how we got robber barons and sweatshops. The people then fought to give themselves a bit of influence on their own pay, by organizing unions and getting wage laws enacted.
The answer, as it turns out, is "the market". Which is why SpaceX pays hundreds of millions in payroll instead of nothing.
It's anchored by the cost of replacing that guy with the next available alternative. Since sweeping the floors is a job a lot of people can do, that cost is fairly low compared with the cost of a rocket scientist.
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