This is the most fundamental tenant of capitalism. The output is perpetually distributed according to initial risk taken, not according to amount of day-to-day work performed. The property of capital is that it keeps growing (more or less) effortlessly. So you just need to capture initial capital and pay employees only returns from capital, not the capital itself. Fun fact: Bill Gates has made vastly more money just sitting around in his "retirement" than working his ass off for 30 years in Microsoft every day.