Only someone on this website would call 122k per year middle class. This is why America is divided. Even if you're the only breadwinner in your household this is solidly above the 85th percentile in income. That's practically the definition of upper class.
I think more accurately, it means you either have enough wealth that you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle, or your income is high enough to support extravagance without going deep into debt.
Bezos doesn't have to work. To be honest, I don't know why he still does. Personally, if the stock options at the startup I work with end up panning out to be worth $5M or more if/when they go public in a few years, I'm taking that cash and retiring at 45. Throwing it into an S&P500 index, I could live off the interest for the rest of my life.
People are generally paid based on how hard they are to replace, not by how much profit they generate. But in some markets, this results in people making terrible wages while the company makes tons of money, ie, Wal-mart and basically all the major fast food chains.
Corporations are so used to applying arbitrary values to ephemeral things on their balance sheets that I think such a mentality seeps over into highly skilled employees in some cases.
In other cases, the business's viability is determined by how many minimum wage (or better yet, off the books entirely) laborers can be obtained in a given week. See: every construction project in every US state, for example.
