These days I wold argue that especially in small businesses and startups the first employees are the real risk takers. The owners/founders will usually find a way to get some money when a company is failing while the employees get nothing.
How are owners of small businesses able to make money while their company fails? I would like to know because I plan on starting a business in the coming year.
The point of starting a company is that you pay time-limited salaries to employees while accumulating investments in systems, tools, and processes that allow for/increase the efficiency of the generation of profits through doing something valuable for others. The portable assets among those investments remain valuable if that value can be harnessed for some context somewhere. Often, these values are far lower than they would be if you had a functioning organization operating them but something is better than nothing.
I think there is small class of founders who fail and end up better off than their employees but it is not the majority of cases. If you factor in resume/connections/experience, that number is certainly higher -- but that seems fair to me.