There are several things here.

One is that you're only considering direct monetary risk. For example, imagine a person that starts a business with X dollars, which will usually be a percentage of their wealth. This person hires an employee at a salary that's barely above their living expenses, but with the idea to ascend as the company grows. If the company goes bust, who loses more? The owner still has money, the person living paycheck to paycheck might not have enough funds to live until they find a new job and they have probably lost money because they didn't go for a higher paying job (with less upside but more safety).

Two, the risk/benefit ratio is not fairly distributed either. If I have a hundred dollars in the bank I cannot really access any investment opportunity, like creating a business, that could multiply that money with the same risk.

Three, thinking only in relative terms is a mistake, even if risk/benefit ratios were evenly distributed, because not all people have the same relative expenses. For example, assume both person A and B get into a stock that after a year gives them a 50% profit. Person A invests their emergency fund, which is $1000 bucks. Person B is far more wealthy and invests $100k, and they still have a lot of money leftover. Here, A is actually taking on more risk because losing that thousand dollars means they might not have enough money to fix their car or pay for health treatment. Person B, if they lose that money, it will hurt but it won't really change their living situation. And when the profits come, A has $500 more, which is not that much and probably goes into the emergency fund again; but B has earned $50k and probably has enough to go on a super nice vacation and still have a lot leftover. In other words, even if the risk/benefit ratio is the same, the actual consequences are not equal. Having more money makes the same ratios far more beneficial in practice.

Losing your job is not nearly the same as losing millions of dollars. You can just get another job. Those millions will be very hard to replace. Even if you get a 6 figure job, how are you going to get those millions back?

> If I have a hundred dollars in the bank I cannot really access any investment opportunity

robinhood.com says hello!

> not all people have the same relative expenses

Right. But that's their problem, not the company's problem. If I sell Bob and Ted each a coffee for $10, and Bob is right and Ted is poor, they still each get charged $10. I don't do a background check and pour over their financial statements in order to determine how much to charge them.

> Losing your job is not nearly the same as losing millions of dollars. You can just get another job. Those millions will be very hard to replace. Even if you get a 6 figure job, how are you going to get those millions back?

"You can just get another job" not that easy for quite a lot of people. Some people lose their job and that leads to losing their homes. If I had to choose, I'd prefer to lose millions of dollars than to lose my house in a vulnerable situation.

> robinhood.com says hello!

Yeah, and the casino exists too, and I bet the casino is safer. What I said is that with less money you don't have the same investment opportunities with the same risk/benefit ratios. Yeah, you can invest in stock and not do any of the crazy options stuff, but that's not really going to give you a lot of profit.

> Right. But that's their problem, not the company's problem.

Never said it's the problem of the company, just that the same amount of dollars has different value to different people. That's one of the mechanisms that makes it easier for people with more money to get even more money for no reason other than having more money: the more you have, the less it matters to lose a certain fixed amount. A $20k investment does not actually have the same risk for someone that has $30k in their account than for someone that has $10M.