A hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars. Washington doesn't even have income tax.
This isn't a perfect analogy with Amazon since they also pay near top of market, but in terms of what you can potentially accomplish, it's similar. Some people are willing to put up with demanding work and long hours in order to be able to say things like "I built S3" or "I built RDS", which gives you instant credibility. To some people that doesn't matter and they're perfectly fine building an internal enterprise app that nobody will ever see if they have less stressful hours. And that's fine too! There's room on the planet for both types of companies, thankfully.