I think that employers generally don't pay employees significantly above market salaries. Certainly not double, even if they're worth 5x or 10x another employe

I think that employers generally don't pay employees significantly above market salaries. Certainly not double, even if they're worth 5x or 10x another employee. Their HR departments won't let them. To do significantly better, you need to be starting a business or contracting. And if it's contracting, you'll probably have to be doing fixed bid contracts, something that divorces your hours worked from the amount paid - so that you don't run into a "we pay no more than $x/hour" clause, where x is whatever the local lousy body shop charges.