Why don't garbage men or teachers or factory workers make as much as CEOs? We need teachers right? Our society would get pretty dirty in a hurry without garbage men and the things we rely on every day wouldn't exist without factory workers.  How can we justify living in a world in which some CEO makes 1000X as much as these people?

A garbage man doesn't make as much as a CEO because the number of people who can be a garbage man are far more than the number of people who can be a CEO.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the reason why CEOs and pro basketball players make so much is because only a tiny percentage of the population can do what they do at their level.

So what makes people mega rich? Again, it boils down to supply and demand: In a capitalistic system, how much we make is tied to how much wealth we produce combined with the competition for people who can produce that wealth.

The value of what we produce is determined by other people (which is what makes capitalism work in the first place).  Bill Gates doesn't get to decide he's rich.  Society does by valuing what he does enough to pay him for the products and services he provides.

Let's use the inventor analogy to illustrate how becoming "mega rich" works. The supply/demand pipeline we'll call it:

Our creative inventor invents a robot in his basement.  He made it because he enjoyed making it.  But its value to society is nil because it's a robot in his basement at this point.

Making a robot was enjoyable to our inventor and our inventor is one of the few people who can produce such a robot.

But to make the robot really change the world, it needs to be available to people everywhere.  To do that, our inventor needs that robot to be able to be mass produced, mass distributed, mass marketed.

But many of those things are NOT enjoyable to do.  The number of people who want to hop on a 6am flight to Tokyo to meet with component vendors and then fly to New York 3 days later to meet with Ingram Micro for a distribution meeting with buyers from major retailers is very small. Definitely not fun.  Our inventor would also need to raise investment capital in order to pay for the mass production of this robot, pay for marketing, and other up front costs so he would have to build a business plan, travel around to meet with investors, etc.

The items I list above involve skills that very few people have.  And out of those few people who have those skills, very few people are willing to do them because they are not fun, especially given the risk -- our inventor could do all these things and have the product fail and all this work and pain would be for nothing.

But every once in a long while, someone steps forward who not only has all or most of the skills necessary to take an idea and get it out there (Henry Ford being an example) but also the willingness to actually go and do it.

And as a result, they become mega rich.

But they don't do it simply because they want to be rich. They start out because they like doing what they're doing.  Material wealth, however, becomes a key ingredient because they won't love every part of what they have to do. 

The super rich make enormous sacrifices that most people simply wouldn't be willing to do to maek their visions a reality.  They miss family time. They have to often do mind numbing work (try putting together a distribution schedule while on a plane at 3am to Hong Kong to meet with a parts supplier and see how fun that is). 

But those sacrifices are much easier to tackle when they thought of compensation comes into play. Our inventor thinks to himself "Well, going to a robotics trade show in Tokyo during Thanksgiving is a pain but I'll be able to afford a nice Ocean vacation house for my family to go and relax at and have enough money to put into my next invention."

The ones who REALLY benefit from this, however, are the rest of us.  Our friendly inventor ultimately succeeds with his robot idea and the rest of us can buy a cool household robot for $299 at Best Buy that cleans houses, does wash, whatever.

Of course, that won't stop some academic at a left-wing site from writing an article arguing that our inventor is greedy and shouldn't be allowed to have his vacation house and the fact that he's worth $5 billion is a disgrace even as one of the inventor's robots is quietly cleaning his house in the background...