At the very front-end is the founder, who typically works without pay as necessary, and typically works far harder than their employees, while shouldering far more responsibility. Millions of businesses get started under that exact scenario every decade.

Employees get paid for their labor. An entrepreneur doesn't have such legal protections or guarantees and is paid for their risk (it's critical to note that 95%+ of all new businesses fail over five years). When I create something, I do so without taking a paycheck initially - perhaps for a very extended period of time. Try convincing an employee to do that at a routine job bagging groceries.

If the employee didn't like it, they were welcome to go through the extremely difficult process of starting and building a successful business instead. It's dramatically more difficult to build a business to the point where you can earn $60,000 per year, than it is to get a job making $60,000 per year.

Sam Walton didn't start out being rich. If his 37th employee didn't like the terms of employment, they were welcome to compete with him if they could. He contributed a million fold more to the business succeeding than any given grocery bagger, and also took on drastically more personal risk. Beyond that, the morality of it is such that the property of Wal-Mart belonged to Sam Walton, and there's no need for entrepreneurs like him to apologize for that ownership, it belongs to them fair and square (the sole counter argument is to say that violence should be used to steal property and to mostly or entirely abolish private property rights). If an employee wants their own property, then let them create it, and let them provide the money to pay employees for their labor.