I perfectly understand what orders of magnitude means. The growth you’ve described does happen, eg if you start at $65000 as junior eng and end up in dozens of millions a year as a SVP or CTO at FAANG-level company. My point is that even that is not exponential yearly, unless you mean “exponential” in the narrow sense of “compound returns”, by that is available to everyone with a brokerage account.

Refreshers aren’t priced at the price of the date of hire, that would be crazy. It’s not more exponential than holding S&P 500.