> I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?

The amount they mutually agree upon. The employee wouldn't agree to work indefinitely for no pay.

The high compensation of successful founders is actually one of the things keeping salaries up, because any of the salaried employees has the option to quit and found their own company. The existing company has to pay well enough to compete with that -- because if what they're paying wasn't actually competitive with that alternative given the relative risk between them, why would anybody accept the salary?

That'd be all very reasonable if we lived in a world where Apple and Google weren't colluding to keep wages down.

Which is why there are laws against that, which are actively being enforced against them.

So you both think people are being paid reasonably and that Google and Apple are colluding with one another.

1) The collusion has presumably stopped now that they're caught.

2) It is possible for both to be true at the same time, because the industry is much larger than Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if they didn't compete with each other, they still have to outbid Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. -- and pay enough to prevent the workers leaving to found their own companies. It's not unreasonable to expect that the effect on wages was marginal even when it was occurring.

You're having to make a lot of presumptions to have to believe these employees are being paid fairly.

The successful entrepreneur makes his money by capital gains in the share or venture capital markets and not by extracting it from his employees. Employees compete with each other for salaries. Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices. By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable. Even Marx got this part correct