They don't become a CEO so they can legally kill people. Both types are committing the crime to make money. The killing is just a side effect. If you have the sort of mindset where you'd stab someone while committing a robbery, but you're smart enough not to commit petty robberies in the first place, then you probably won't have much ethical trouble with emitting deadly pollution, maintaining unsafe working environments, and that sort of thing when you're putting your talents to more legal uses.

It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.