It’s being phrased as an ROI per employee “asset”, not as compensation per actual employee.

Gabe is pocketing most of this.

It’s not ‘clever wording’, it says what it is - dividing profit by the number of employees results in a higher number for valve.
The heading isn’t comparing employee paychecks,it’s about overall company performance.

For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.

Now, that is an average, and it’s hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.