Jeff Bezos got nearly $300,000 to start a small online bookstore that was statistically unlikely to succeed (most small businesses fail within their first years).
Elon Musk acquired several thousands of dollars in his first projects, and Tesla often gets subsidies in hundreds of millions of dollars from the American government.
In stark contrast, the yearly median American income is $31,133 while yearly median rent is $21,924, average food costs are $6,600 per year, and average clothing costs are $1,932 in a year. This means that an average worker can have leftover wealth of just $677 per year; it would take over 400 years of working for an average proletarian to amass enough wealth to start a business like Bezos did.
For surplus-value extraction, we can see that the average CEO earns $20,000,000 per year as compensation. Compare that to the average worker’s income that is little over $30,000. The CEO earns more than 600 times as much as the worker, even though a CEO’s labour is not much more skilled, intense, etc. than an average worker’s.
Therefore, capitalism rewards those who own means of production and labour-power, not those who work harder or better. That is why it does not reward merit.
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Some View on the World 