You're thinking about this from the perspective of someone who's already technically strong. If you aren't technically strong, trying to prise dollars from fingers is often less terrifying than trying to deal with an impenetrable technical jungle.

That is assuming you have an infinite amount of time to master programming. What would you choose if you had, say, a year?

Learning to program (especially beyond just being a basic code monkey) requires a certain kind of mind, on top of years and years of hard work and continuous practice.

So, I wouldn't say that the odds of success are better going from business to programming -- unless you want to run the risk of writing code that may not meet your demands, or you already know how to code and want to start in business (in which case the situation is circular). I have seen business people fail miserably at programming. I would say that the odds are the same, going either way. It takes the right kind of person to program (not just code), and the right kind of person to operate a business. It takes both of these to get both.