Anyone who thinks that a PhD is the fastest way to riches needs to have their head examines (by a PhD).
This is largely what I would expect. A PhD (actually, anything after the Master's) isn't really about acquiring new technical skills. It's about learning to put into practice the basic values that sustain the discipline, which in science consist largely of 1) a fanatical obsession with figuring out what the data is really telling you, 2) relentlessly questioning your hypotheses and entertaining alternative explanations, and 3) rooting out the various cognitive nooks and crannies wherein lie the temptations to fool yourself or others.
For most technical jobs, these kinds of habits are not really germane to what you are being asked to do. Hence many businesses are quite reluctant to hire people with PhDs at all. The ones they do pick up will tend to agree that their PhD was a "waste of time."
I've also had my mentors strongly discourage me from doing a PhD in Physics, despite my ability, because of how overly saturated academia is with physicists and how I will have lost money to the order of half a million or more while returning to the same exact salary and salary cap after the PhD is finished.