Ilya Suskever is not a "mid-level" (as per the article) employee, he is a C-suite level employee at a tech venture.

Implying that uniqlo is using "$8.8m salaries to draw talent" implies that those salaries are broadly available to "mid-level" employees.

This is extremely implausible to me, given that that level of compensation (4x more than the C-suite employee you identified) is on par or larger than CEOs of some of the largest banks in the world.

It's possible that a company could pay this much. But likely they could pay half this amount and still get same talent.

In a free market with logical players, makes 0 sense to pay 3-4x the highest competitor in wages, when you could pay 25-50% more and get the same talent.

Of course that's just the theory. Companies can pay whatever they want in reality.

To assume that everyone is making or will make the top 0.1% of the top 1% in salaried income is completely absurd.

Maybe the one off rockstar engineer is making this, but for the average techbro this is not going to happen.