The thesis here is based on equating the mythology of the 10x engineer with top athletes and entertainers without considering the demand models and performance

The thesis here is based on equating the mythology of the 10x engineer with top athletes and entertainers without considering the demand models and performance measurement. In sports, billions of people compete from childhood on a physical competition with exactly the same rules where performance is completely objective and immediately visible. People only want to watch the very best, so as long as you have global distribution of live feeds, then of course all the money is going to very tiny set of top performers. With actors/musicians, it's not 100% objective, but it's still directly based on audience appeal, and you can pretty quickly determine who has popular appeal and draw a through line from various business models to what the superstar can economically be paid. However in the vast majority of businesses, it's a team effort there is no direct connection between individual contributors and customer choice. The closest role for this would be sales, but even in that case they're selling the product and the brand, not themselves. Furthermore, effective contribution usually requires a fair amount of ramp-up and domain knowledge. As a hiring manager it's incredibly difficult to know who will be a 10x-er before hiring—even if you have reliable inside information from other companies, you don't have a guarantee it will pan out in your environment. Certainly there are some superstar engineers with specific well-known expertise, and they do get outsize offers, but there are very few such roles that require "the top global expert in X niche" and while engineers can get 7 figure offers for these, there's not enough of a through-line to revenue for it to rise to the level of superstars in other disciplines which are more or less a direct function of the size of global attention and discretionary spending they command.