While I can certainly agree that people can have relative value, and even agree that a disparity of four orders of magnitude might just be possible on occasion (though overall i'm skeptical of that claim), I think we're confusing skill/value to society vs value in terms of money one can extract via their skills/etc.

Generally, at the high end of skill, skill increases linearly, but financial reward can sometimes increase exponentially with it.

While someone may be 100x more skilled than someone else, this can result in them making 10,000x as much money as them. Is that fair? I'm not sure. Certainly some amount of potential reward is helpful, as it may drive some to pursue skill and benefit society as a whole, but I think It's grown out of proportion.