You're confusing causation and correlation even if your premise is valid (which is totally questionable). First, Google and Apple have nothing to do with perso

You're confusing causation and correlation even if your premise is valid (which is totally questionable). First, Google and Apple have nothing to do with personal wealth, they are corporations. The fact that have lots of corporate wealth means they have resources to put into innovation. They can do that completely independently of whether they pay absurd salaries or stock-dividends. Corporations can profit off their activities and put the profits back into innovation, and when that happens they are business expenses that aren't even taxed!! So the entire issue about taxation of wealthy incomes is only about wealth that people take home as personal profit and do not reinvest in business. Now, let's accept the questionable premise that these people with high incomes produce the greatest innovation. That simply means that innovation correlates with high income. It does not tell us anything about cause. Maybe these are people who would be innovative no matter what and our system happens to reward that with riches. If that hypothesis holds, then higher taxes would have zero impact on their innovation. There's tons of evidence that innovative people are motivated in other ways besides getting richer, i.e. that the promise of further riches isn't the cause of their innovative work.