Your glass is half empty. There are businesses you can start for under $1000, you may not personally be aware of them, but they exist (the business I own was started with much less than this amount in 2016 & has delivered decent returns with part-time hours since, no particular skills other than basic English & hard work required). Obviously you will need to spend time over your nominated 50 hour a week time commitment, why is this impossible? If you want to build wealth you need to put in the time. I don't recall claiming any of this was easy.

I guess some elements of capitalism need people with your defeatist outlook, to be lifelong wage slaves.

The glass is what it is. To be defeatist is to commit yourself to failure. I have no such ambition or shall I say lack thereof. To be a realist is to properly understand the world as it is and plan accordingly. If one wants to actually succeed then this is infinitely more valuable that fake optimism.

There are a lot of as you put it "wage slave" businesses which have 45 people making barely enough to live 4 folks making 20% more in semi-supervisory positions working 60 hours a week with lots of unpaid overtime effectively making less per hour than the grunts and 1 guy making a decent living.

You can accurately say that any of the guys could in theory move up but the logic breaks down trying to apply it to the group as a whole with one position essentially worth having anyone COULD move up but EVERYONE never could.

Society is essentially so constructed in the large. We can't all sell each other financial products. If we want society to function we will have to have a whole lot of people who are modestly compensated and I don't just mean french fry cooks. There are a lot of positions that are both challenging and necessary that really aren't paid that much. These people aren't all stupid losers and they aren't all too stupid to be business tycoons. They fit into the slots that society made and if we want people to move up we ought to do a better job at creating such slots and allocating resources to them.

Bemoaning the fact that people haven't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is basically useless.

What business did you start?