Today's outputs are nonlinear.
The most productive people might produce millions of time more value than others, but don't work a million times harder.
This often comes down to leverage: the ability to get more out for what you put in.
We can do this by incentivising other people to do things for us (by paying them, or owning the economic assets they work within), or by getting computers to do things for us (like distributing ideas, or running algorithms).
In theory, we can use leverage to solve people's problems (and thus get paid) at scale.
But in practice, there's nuance.