I believe - someone more financially literate (and far richer!) correct me if I'm wrong - that you can convert some of those wages into various different vehicles and get paid in non-wage forms in certain cases. Correlation != causation of course, but if you're making $500k/year chances are pretty good a large chunk of that is non-wage income such as capital gains, corporate bonuses, trust funds, etc. And even if it was all wage-derived, over time you could easily realize major capital gains on it if you're lucky enough to (a) make a huge chunk 'o change, (b) have low-enough cost of living to be able to move it into investments and then (c) have enough life stability to be able to continue this pattern for several years or decades (or better yet, have grandparents and parents who did then passed the wealth down to you). Even after taxes as high as 50%, with enough raw wage income you can definitely pivot your "margin" into vehicles that yield serious ROI over time, and can even leverage the highly disparate cost of living to your advantage: use NYC's housing market to justify a ridiculous salary, then live super cheap out there somehow (insert hand-waving magic reference here), and use the difference to buy housing out in, say, rural Texas or Kansas before the pandemic, rent it out via property company, reap profit month-after-month.

From there you follow the directions on your shampoo bottle:

1. Lather

2. Rinse

3. Repeat