A burger flipper makes $10 in an hour. An engineer designing a burger flipping robot makes $100. Their department's engineering manager makes $1,000. The CTO makes $10,000.
The hardest worker here is the burger flipper. They work 16 hour days just to afford rent, and it's hard manual labor.
The engineer makes 10 times as much because each line of code they write produces more value than an entire day of manual burger flipping.
Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems.
The CTO makes 10 times that because their policies affect many engineering departments throughout a large organization and have multibillion-dollar consequences. It doesn't matter if they work 1000 times harder than a burger flipper, they probably work less than the burger flipper. But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.