[FelixP]

Optimistically, I think it'd be a great thing if this (or even some portion of it) came to pass.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) Salman Khan is arguably this already (although he's not a "teacher" in the narrow, institutional sense) - he's managed to educate thousands of students rapidly, and he's raised a significant amount of capital for Khan Academy (not to mention attracted quite a bit of media attention)

2) The best private schools, I suspect, house many potential "superstar" teachers. The problem is that the schools have most of the reputational value and reap almost all of the financial rewards. In a lot of ways, it's an information asymmetry problem; I attended such a school and had what I would imagine to be a very disproportionately high number of superstar teachers, but I didn't know which teachers were superstars until after I had enrolled in the school and taken their courses.