I'd like to know how many of these top 100 executives are people who started their own companies and took the risk to create a company that met the needs of the populace and are now reaping the benefits.
Yes, I'd like to know this too. However, and admittedly without knowing the facts, I'd be very surprised if more than a few of these highly paid CEOs started the companies they now direct. Certainly in the tech and biotech industries, the companies are usually started by technical people - engineers, scientists, etc. - who have some idea and who take the big risks getting the company started. As you say, 9/10 of these small businesses don't survive, but those that do can start to make a lot of money. Once a lot of money is involved, the technical people who had the ideas and who's work generates the value, are usually replaced in the management levels by "business people" with MBAs and other training that we're told is necessary to run a big, successful business. The C-level executives, the VPs, and most if not all of the upper management of most big corporations are rarely technical people even in technical industries (think of Steve Ballmer, Meg Whitman or Paul Otellini).
The simple answer: Vote with your wallets.
I agree with this. But in order for this to work several things have to be true (most of which are currently not the case):
1) Consumers have to recognize that purchasing decisions are social/political decisions - the world is run by corporations more than governments, so the companies you support with your money are determining the nature of the society you live in and the future of our civilization far more than the politicians you vote for. Voting with your wallet only works when people recognize that they're voting when they buy something.
2) Consumers have to have access to far more information about the behaviour of corporations in the past, the consequences of that behaviour, and the future plans corporations have. If, as a consumer, you want to support environmentally sustainable coffee harvesting, for example, but there is nothing stopping Starbucks from claiming to be using environmentally sustainable practises with out actually doing so, voting with your wallet isn't going to work.
3) Corporate identity needs to be more clearly tracked; if company X behaves in a way that I don't like, so I choose to spend my money with company Y instead, that's fine as long as the individuals making the decisions I disapprove of at company X aren't subsequently being hired by company Y. Despite the fact that they are legal entities, corporations are not people, and you can't vote for or against any corporation when the people that make them up move between them.
4) The market has to provide alternatives. Suppose you need a widget, and there are three corporations, X, Y and Z, that make widgets. If you don't want to support corporation X because they're exploiting child slave labour, but corporations Y and Z are also using child slave labour in order to compete, voting with your wallet isn't an option.
5) More philosophically, while it's always been the case that the rich have had most of the power, I think most social philosophers and historians agree that societies that protect and serve the interests of the poor at least to some degree, are more sustainable in the long term. If we accept voting with our wallets as the primary mechanism where by we participate as citizens, we disenfranchise the vast majority of humanity. This is ultimately unsustainable, so we need other mechanisms to regulate corporate control of our economy and society.