Being rich and living a fulfilling life are orthogonal concerns, once you're out of the poor-and-starving territory. This means that both can be achieved independently, including together.
I just want to point out that billionaires don't just magically create more money for charities. Someone had to lose that money.
For the sake of simplicity, lets say... Goods & services were priced optimally to reduce the middle classes disposable income. The billionaire throws the poor-and-starving a bone every now and then.
Should the middle class have more disposable income? Or should charities get their bone? It's a matter of philosophy.
Being rich is being in control. You get to decide who gets your money.
This applies on the employee side too: employees have the option to go into business for themselves and take their skills directly to the marketplace, but they make a choice to trade surplus profits beyond their salary back to their employer, usually for the security of knowing that they'll continue to receive a paycheck even if those profits never materialize. This was a very conscious choice for me last time I took a job - I looked at it as "Well, I'll be doing the same thing I was as an entrepreneur, but my employer bears the risk of it not working out in the market" - though I suspect most people don't think like that. It is a choice, though, and once I felt like taking more risks, I left.
I was an employee for years before I left to do my startup. I definitely thought about the purely monetary risk/incentive issues you raise, but I thought about many others:
- if I stay longer as an employee, will my training make my startup more successful?
- am I prepared to be alone, not relying on a boss to tell me what to do and provide guidance on my work quality?
- will I become isolated running my startup not relying on an employer for exposure?
- will being so independent make me more motivated or less?
There's no question I thought about monetary risk/reward, but it's so difficult to calculate any risk/reward with any new company. Often, all you have to go on are these softer questions that you have to answer for yourself.
That abstract reasoning seem to miss a lot. Where I live, rent is crazy expensive. Rich people own their own homes. Almost everyone I know rents, giving a lot of money to people who need it less than they do. (I don't even dream of ever owning a house here. A cheap one is >$1m.) It's like a Monopoly game near the end, all the money going one way. So sure, you could say not-being-homeless is 'of more value to themselves than the money' but it would be a weird way of putting it.