You might have heard of some of the following list of names:
Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Bricklin, Vinton Cerf, Douglas Englebart, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, Ken Thompson
Some of you have seen that all of these people are in the computer field, so here are a couple more names from different fields:
Stephanie Kwolek, Gregory Pincus
What these people have in common is that they all created huge wealth in the economy, but they themselves never became wealthy.
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web that you are using to read this.
Dan Bricklin created Visicalc, the first computer spreadsheet program, which helped the personal computer industry to take off.
Vinton Cerf was a leader in the creation of the Internet.
Douglas Englebart invented the computer mouse and helped pioneer other computer networking and hypertext concepts.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the Unix operating system, and Ritchie led the invention of the C computer language. Unix is the ancestor of most operating systems in wide use today. The C language and its successors are used to write a large percentage of the world's software.
Bjarne Stroustrup invented the C++ programming language, a successor to C, and widely used to write software, and as a base for other newer languages.
Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar, the high strength polymer that is used for bullet proof vests and many other applications.
Gregory Pincus led the development of the birth control pill, now used by millions of women world wide.
All of them probably have been very materially comfortable, or even quite affluent, but they do not have the wealth of Mitt Romney, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, or many other CEOs or people in the financial industry. I contend that these people, and many others that I do not know about, have created far more wealth and more jobs than most of the so called "job creators" the conservatives like to talk about. There are some people who do create vast wealth and themselves become wealthy. Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are examples of such people. But there are many like the people I listed that create vast wealth without becoming wealthy, and there are others who become wealthy without adding wealth to the economy as a whole. There are even people who become wealthy even though they harm the rest of the economy.
The "market" is not always fair, not always efficient, and does not always distribute rewards proportional to the contribution. I hope the comments give other examples of people who made a big economic contribution without becoming wealthy.