So you argue that Lebron James provides more value to society than people running the companies that actually keep society productive? America's insane obsession with sports is amazing.
A team gives him a specific amount of money to perform a very specific task, which is 'perform on a basketball court'. The team paying him believes that his performance will draw in fans and money to outweigh what they're paying him.
Netflix didn't pay Adam Sandler for 'thought leadership'. They paid him to deliver a certain number of films, which they know that they can extract a certain amount of value from.
The only way to measure executive leadership is the impact they've had on a company's valuation, and that impact cannot be as clearly tied to a single person as Lebron James' performance on the court, or Adam Sandler's (admittedly surprising given how bad his last several movies have been) star power.