It doesn’t happen via salary, it happens via stock. Work at a big co over the last decade or so and you’ve seen salary increase at 10% year or so and stock increase much faster. It’s very common for senior engineers in the Bay Area to be earning 175k salary, ~30k bonus, and another 150+ in stock vesting per year. High performers and/or workers at FAANGs do better than that. See levels.fyi for concrete examples.

The whole thing here is stock, which takes a couple years to really stack up, but once it does, you’re making a lot of money.