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Notes -
Bringing in money is certainly the best actual metric in terms of actual value generated for the company, but it's also really hard to measure on a per-employee basis. My intent was to analogize a pro athletes performance in the sport against a generic employee's value creation.
That said, most times I've encountered people attempting to model how much actual value professional athletes generate, generally the conclusion is that the top players are far underpaid relative to how much money they make for the teams and leagues. Eg. I think when Conor McGregor was in his prime, he was getting paid I think less than 2x as much by the UFC as any other lightweight championship fighter (like a few hundred thousand USD per fight, for single-digit million for the year), and I read some article claiming that he was responsible for some double digit percentage of the UFC's total revenue, which seems to be on the order of multiple hundred million USD, which seems entirely plausible. I've seen similar things written about other big stars over the years, like Michael Jordan or Shohei Ohtani, and I don't know how good these models are, but to a basic fan with some basic understanding of the way these leagues operate, they all seem quite plausible.
And given the pay disparities in some professional sports which can be like 100:1 for top players versus rookies, that this disparity is smaller than their ACTUAL value would indicate that individuals really can be worth orders of magnitude more valuable in doing the same job.
If we want to get at the ACTUAL value, perhaps we could look at actual income of musicians, who usually sink or swim by their own personal direct success at making songs popular enough to get people to listen to them on streaming platforms or even buy on CD. And so there's no company setting salary to really manipulate the income. There, we know that the top performers are billionaires, and the bottom ones don't make minimum wage.
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