I've had complete opposite experience. Do the people who hire for this kind of work often bet on non-PhD candidates? Do they trust themselves to separate the wheat from the chaff?

Don't you want a colleague who is able to mention seminal papers for specific problems? Who is able to read and understand these papers and can distill useful features and optimizations from them?

People with PhD who go into business, usually end up in the better positions. They hire other PhD's for the good positions to keep the signal (mastery of the content) stronger.

As someone who did a lot of work with data I have little problem with my usefulness, but a lot of problems opening doors to the really interesting data companies (lacking a proper academic network). I wish I had gotten that PhD, because right now applying to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo or eBay for data science positions makes me look like a fool.