This seems like it's incorrectly estimating orders of magnitude. Some actual numbers: In 2019, Google's gross revenue was ~$162b. ~$76b went to "costs of rev

This seems like it's incorrectly estimating orders of magnitude. Some actual numbers: In 2019, Google's gross revenue was ~$162b. ~$76b went to "costs of revenue", ~$26b went to R&D, and ~$11b to stock-based compensation. It's unclear what % of costs of revenue is attributable to "salaries of software engineers", though. Let's approach it another way. Google employs 30k+ SWEs, the vast majority of which are in the US. The median outlay probably falls somewhere in the L4 - L5 range, though there's a fat tail at the top. If we want to be conservative, we can just ignore the tail and say ~300k/dev. $300k * 30k = $9b (this is probably low). Google's net income in 2019 was $34b. So you could multiply SWE comp at Google by not-quite-5 and zero out Google's net income. What do top pro athletes make? Wikipedia says the top pro athletes earn mid-high eight-figures/year. There's some headroom to pay engineers more, but it's definitely not "top pro athlete" more. Engineers can and do make that kind of money by founding & growing successful startups, not by working for FAANG (possibly with a very small # of exceptions at the top).