I've hired a person without even a bachelors. They competed in Kaggle competition relevant to what we were working on, and were one of the top competitors. I reached out, hired, and it worked out well for all sides. Eventually, they left to do a startup. But we got our money's worth, and they got a decent salary for a while, and a decent spot on their resume.

I don't think the emphasis should be on Ph.D so much as on demonstrating your competence. A thesis is a way to do that. Kaggle is another. A startup is another. So is doing some interesting crunching on data sets and writing blog posts or articles. Another way is to work up from Analyst to Data Scientist to ML (or other jobs -- you might be able to start in ML at a startup at a low salary).

But if you have no track record, you'll need to get one somehow. A single course degree isn't sufficient. That's 1/32nd of a Bachelor's degree, 1/8th of a Master's, or 1/25th of a Ph.D.