A large number of companies failed in the dotcom crash, but the founders did pretty well if they'd made it to an exit event. Don't forget that it was a stock market bubble imploding. The founders and early employees had already sold shares in the IPOs that put the companies on exchanges. It was the investors who bought stock that lost money.

The after effects were that it was virtually impossible to raise capital for a while afterwards, so the next round of founders struggled. But then interest rates went to practically zero and money got cheap so it was all good.

Wait. Are you talking companies, or people? Companies come and go. They are replaceable virtual containers for people. I don’t think it’s appropriate to apply the term “poverty” to companies.

The Yahoo founders left with never-fly-commercial money before re-joining the billionaire club by investing the money they had. Others that survived post-IPO include eBay and Dell.

There were high profile failures but we have had those recently too eg. pet.com (dot com) and color.com (post-dot com, domain has since been repurposed)

eBay, Priceline (now Booking.com) did very well too

I know numerous multimillionaire dot-com techies. I guess they're not "top players".

Jim Cramer lost big but has continued spouting nonsense ever since pretty successfully

Mark Cuban?