Here’s a counter-argument I’d like to try out. I don’t know how good this one is, but…
The value that you add depends on what you do.
First example: someone who manufactures useful widgets is useful to society roughly in proportion to the number of widgets they make — this is probably non-linear diminishing return of usefulness with more production, but I think in practice we can ignore that most of the time for simple manufacturing jobs.
The range here is small, perhaps only a factor of 2-10.
Second example: an inventor who makes a machine that makes it easier to make those widgets. Their value to society could be as much as “difference in number of widgets produced by everyone combined, totalled over a period which is hard to even estimate”, unless that number is so large that diminishing returns is relevant. Unlike the people who actually make the widget, it’s reasonably likely for the person who invents a widget-making-machine to reqch this point. You might even get some extra problems from technological unemployment - short term or long term, it’s still a problem - or the waste of overproduction.
It isn’t as simple as saying “Tim Berners-Lee is as valuable as the entire internet”, because of all the work of other people that built on his, but even a single invention can benefit society to the tune of billions.
Third example: an entrepreneur who recognises a problem in the world and creates a solution. A new type of widget, or whatever. In an optimistic case, they might hire people that would otherwise be unemployed.
I’m not saying this always happens - and “wealth creator” as a term seems to be used to describe people that get rich by moving money around rather than just those who get rich by doing what I describe here - but that it could happen means it’s worth keeping track of.
I would argue that creating a thousand new jobs is at least as valuable to society as the cost of a thousand unemployed people, though almost certainly not as valuable as the wages those thousand earn in the new jobs, because that would be double-counting.
This could still easily be worth millions per year.
Fourth example: Management. Most work is done by teams, and a manager who can make their team 10% more productive is worth as much to society as that productivity boost, summed over the entire team.
I will acknowledge that management can be bad as well as good, so the sort of manager which makes everyone in the team resign (a friend mine recently left such a team because of such a manager) is worth negative their combined productivity.
I can easily believe that Bezos has been an enormous force multiplier because of all the other retailers that have not grown like Amazon. I can believe that Musk is great for SpaceX and entirely average for Tesla, because of how well SpaceX is doing and how averagely Tesla is doing.
How much is SpaceX worth? How much is reducing launch costs by a factor of three worth? I’m not sure, but it’s a lot, and SpaceX succeeded where all the other launch providers — and their, I assume, equally smart engineers — failed.
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As a separate point, I totally agree with your implicit claim that productivity != income.