The taxes are not particularly high outside of very specific things. If you spend most of your wealth on large gas-guzzling cars and alcohol, your overall tax rate will be high. Other than that, people tend to overestimate how high Norwegian tax rates are.
I'm Norwegian, lives in the UK, and at one point worked for a US startup and we looked at moving me over to California. As a result I compared my specific situation, with an income at the time of several times the UK national average, and a slightly lower multiple of the Norwegian average. That put me well into the top tax brackets in the UK and Norway.

Yet my "fully loaded" tax bill in the UK and Norway came out at ~37% and 38% respectively, and at ~35% in California. This is everything paid by me: VAT/sales tax (at 25% in Norway, but since most people don't spend a huge proportion of their income on stuff where VAT applies, it doesn't contribute that much to overall tax paid), local government taxes/property taxes, wealth taxes, income taxes, as well as national insurance (compulsory part of healthcare/pensions etc.) and equivalents. When factoring in the need for private health insurance in California to cover things that are free at point of service in Norway and the UK, I'd break pretty much even on that respect. If you include payroll taxes etc. paid by employer, as some people like to do when they want to complain about tax levels, it might shift a bit bit further towards the US (but the UK and most European countries are at Norwegian levels there).

Some other US states would have left me a bit better off tax wise, though less than one might expect (but that's moot if I can't make the same salary or even find a job there). Then again, by that argument I could've substantially reduced my tax bill in Norway too by moving to the northernmost regions which have special tax breaks (or no income tax at all on Svalbard, but then I don't think there's many tech companies up there...).

The real outcome regarding tax level is "it depends" whether or not you can or want to live in the lowest tax areas and whether or not you can take maximum advantage of tax breaks (e.g. one thing that can drive Norwegian taxes down is that there's a number of things, including most loan interest, that can be deducted from gross income to arrive at taxable income, and this can make the tax rate paid by two people with the same salary vastly different; compared to the UK at least, the potential for deductions is far higher) and/or spend your money on things that are taxed at special rates.

But wealth is far more distributed in Norway as well (though that didn't apply in a like for like comparison of salary lie mine) so while we have fewer extremely rich people, unless you earn substantially above average elsewhere chances are you'd get a higher salary in Norway. This is a huge part of the reason Norway is so expensive: salary for low level staff in e.g. retail positions is far closer to the median in Norway than most places, and so contributes disproportionately to the cost of goods and services compared to elsewhere. For a majority of the population, this is sufficient to more than make up for tax and cost of living differences and leave them better off in Norway than most other places.