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How do you define "justified"? The field is so new, someone who really knows what they're doing could mean a difference between a large team spending years and getting nowhere remarkable, and improving state of the art every 6 months. With the same exact team. So would you rather get nothing for your money, or something valuable every 6-9 months? That's the question. These people are typically hired after trying pretty hard to get results out of generalists, and failing.

I think he's asking if these people produce positive marginal value to the company. The answer is usually yes.

I don't think AT&T made much from Bell Labs.

Directly.

Unix-compatibility has yielded more income to other companies than to the company that designed it.

If you can improve ad targeting effectiveness at google's scale I imagine you'd justify your salary pretty quickly.