Still not sure what point you are trying to make Super. If it is to simply acknowledge that super high athlete pay (and entertainers) add a significant portion to the uber wealthy. That is probably true and could be proven with data.
If that is your point, and we also add that sports stars and entertainers are probably the biggest percentage of AF's that reach that group. It is like natural DEI. It is also achieved totally fairly in the free market.
Do you remember the "pet" rock chatski of the 70's? It probably made 100s of $Millions in today's dollars. There are probably 100k+ women making 6 or 7 figures on Onlyfans-- everything from chatty pretty flirty girls all the way to video porn.
In all those cases, it is fine that money was made because people choose and want to buy it. Even for the dumb people that happily paid money for a rock with a rope leash to pull on ground.
I'm not making any point in particular. I think, as a conservative, you're not terribly bothered by income inequality in the first place. Fine. I don't agree, but your position isn't irrational or craziness.
I would say a couple of things in specific response to you:
1. One weakness of libertarian-tinged conservative thought (which is the majority of the conservative intellectual tradition in this country), in my view, is the idea that "in the market" = "totally fairly." There's nothing about market competition that is inherently moral or good. It's surely better than hereditary nobility, but that alone doesn't make it comport with our understanding of ethics. That it's better than communism is not really a point in its favor either, at least not from a theoretical perspective.
The advent of AI, I think, makes my point more accessible than ever before. We've got a few enormous tech companies battling it out for AI supremacy. One of them will win the race, more than likely. So now the one that wins the race and develops an artificial general intelligence now uses that AGI to generate trillions of dollars of wealth for a handful of people. Is that OK just because it was achieved totally fairly in the market? That a few privileged men can buy or sell half the globe?
2. I'd like to leave race out of this discussion because it can lead to stereotyping that makes me feel uncomfortable. Yes, I would guess that entertainers are a higher percentage of black billionaires than white billionaires. There are, of course, reasons for that and many of them lie in our discriminatory past. In my view, not all of them (my view is that there will always be natural variation between cultural groups, which doesn't prove very much but isn't nothing), but it's also true that there's still a thousand and one ways to lose with the shoes and the idea that sports and music are the vehicles for upward mobility among minorities is dangerous.
I don't think you said anything bad but I don't think it's a productive direction for the discussion. If you disagree, I mean, I don't own the thread. I just think it's an obliquely relevant consideration at best.