There's a scene in the book where the author is interviewing the thief in prison during one of his (several) custodial sentences, and the conversation goes something like this:
Author: You're intelligent, erudite, charming. Why don't you become a lawyer or something?
Thief: It takes about 10 years to become a lawyer, with undergrad, law school, articleing, etc. I don't want to do any of that. But say I did, a partner at a top firm makes what, $600k? That's around what I'm alleged to have made this year
Author: But what about the strain on your family?
Thief: Because lawyers don't get divorced?
It continues like this for awhile as the thief very persuasively argues the risk adjusted returns of high-end larceny
So let's say a partner at a top 100 firm in 2008, latest?
No one has nor should have a monopoly on sympathy.
Did it, though? That sort of misfortune can and does happen even without entrepreneurship, and might well have happened to him anyway.
Of course he did, as it made his enormous wealth seem like the result of great sacrifices.
You see this all the time.
Why do the rich deserve all their money? Because they made such great sacrifices and took all those tremendous risks. It's self-aggrandizement and self-justification.
Low wage workers make sacrifices and take risks just as great (or greater) all the time, but no one is going to pay hundreds of dollars a plate to hear them give a keynote speech humblebragging about how they worked so hard they had 3 heart attacks during their minimum wage jobs (from which they probably got fired for having to miss work), or how their marriages broke up... which happens all the time.
That's not to disagree with you, we often overlook the struggles and challenges of people in lower economic classes or less prestigious positions. More just to say I didn't get that humble brag vibe at all.
Oh, and I also don't know if he got paid, as I think he was an alumnus and it may have just been a volunteer speech. Again, I know there are other speeches in which people do get paid and follow the pattern you outlined, just saying I don't think this was one of them.
One of the biggest problems is the fact that anything you can do can be done better by paying someone else to do nothing but the thing you want to do yourself.
Plenty of people who were never entrepreneurs suffer the same or worse.. and do so while earning a tiny pittance of what CEOs make.
Lack of money causes all sorts of additional stress on families as well... including health issues from not being able to afford health care, or only getting poor quality healthcare, or not being able to afford preventative care, eating poorly, living in dangerous/polluted areas, not being able to afford to send your kids to college, not being able to afford vacations, etc..
Not to mention the stress of being treated like shit or replaceable cogs by the people above you in work environments that are unhealthy or unsafe.
CEOs have it easy.