This is a very important distinction to make. Bo performed a lot of labor to make this show. It was over a year of work. A $4 million salary is still an insane amount of money, but regardless the value he created for Netflix was significantly more than what he received.

However, this is only looking at things monetarily. The reason Bo’s special is able to be worth so much is that Netflix hires hundreds of employees to organize and consolidate the attention of their customers, which is then lent to Bo with the understanding that Bo will participate in this attention cycle. So Bo actually gains a lot of social capital out of this exchange as well. Compared to every other worker in the chain, he gets pretty much all of it.

But here’s the important part: that social capital is a loan. An investment. It will let him retain enough clout and prestige to do another Netflix special in a few years, but if he stops producing or begins to actively undermine the system, he will be cut off and forgotten. You could say that even compared to the executive who pay him he ends up with more social capital, but there is a difference between being the user of social capital and being the owner. Bo is the user. The worker. The faceless Netflix CEO is the owner. I don’t know anything about the Netflix CEO, but I’d imagine they keep their public life pretty low key. Despite this, they are in control of more social capital than Bo Burnham could ever utilize.