Two economists spent a decade in and around the Treasury Department linking business tax filings to the individuals who own the businesses, and found 3 million private business owners in the United States with at least $5 million in net worth.
The public version of American wealth is the Forbes 400, which sits in four or five cities. Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick say the group that matters is spread across every town in the country, owns car dealerships and dental practices rather than technology companies, and is largely invisible because the businesses are private.
"It's a reason we call them everywhere millionaires because the whole map lights up."
Zidar teaches at Princeton, Zwick at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and they built the first database that linked confidential tax records to individual business owners — work that started as a tax-policy question in a Treasury basement in 2014.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 65 minutes of audio, 24 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 insights that matter.
👤 Guests: Owen Zidar, an economist at Princeton University, and Eric Zwick, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who spent a decade linking confidential US tax records to the owners of private businesses and wrote The Everywhere Millionaire
🎙️ Host: Bogumil Baranowski, founder of Blue Infinitas Capital, an author and TEDx speaker who advises families investing over a lifetime and across generations
📰 Published: 13 September 2026 on YouTube (Talking Billions)
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Key Takeaways
The rich in America are 3 million private business owners, not 400 people on the coasts
The threshold is $5 million in net worth outside finance and technology, and the average is about $25 million
The 1986 tax reform is the event that created this class of wealth
It cut individual rates below the corporate rate, so new businesses stopped incorporating as C corporations
More than half the rise in top-1% income since the late 1980s comes from pass-through business profits
What predicts a successful founder is a decade of industry experience, not starting capital
Karen Bentlage went from selling tanning beds to owning them, on savings rather than a nest egg
The businesses are deliberately unglamorous — auto dealers, beer distributors, contractors
One of the people in the book sold a trash-bag-liner company for $350 million
They found their subjects by reading property tax records for big houses in small markets
A quarter of the House's tax-writing committee are private business owners, and three are auto dealers
This is an age of millionaires rather than a second gilded age
The $60 million wedding the book opens with was thrown by third-generation car dealers, not industrialists
1. Linking the Tax Forms
The project started as a narrow tax-policy question inside the Treasury Department in 2014, where two newly minted economics PhDs were brought in to work with staff economists. The data to answer it did not exist.
Zwick described the gap they were asked to fill: "When we think about these private businesses, they didn't really have the data set up in a way where you could link the businesses to the owners to think about how much tax those businesses paid."
Zidar explained the mechanics of why the link matters: "So businesses file a form that says here are my revenues, here are my costs, here's my profit, and then for pass through businesses, which are the typical business in America, the profits and losses flow through to the individual owners."
The company files a form for each owner, so the money can be followed from the business to the person
The two sets of records were never designed to be joined: "But as Eric said, they weren't made to be linked."
"And so we had to do a lot of work to kind of decipher what exactly everything meant, made sure that all added up and figure out how to, you know, bring it all together. And we were the first to do that."
The database itself had no documentation, so part of the work was done over lunch with a man they call the architect — one of the designers of the electronic filing system for tax returns — during a stop on an academic seminar trip
The individuals were anonymized and taxpayer privacy was protected by the way the data was accessed, but the picture of where these owners were and what they did was clear enough to say where to look
The matching ran one year at a time — the population of businesses linked to their owners, then the workers, then earlier years back to the late 1990s and early 2000s
2. Where Inequality Came From
The first finding that told them this was bigger than a tax-policy question came out of the most famous chart in the field.
Zidar named the chart and its authors: "So I think there's this really famous graph in economics, the top 1% income share over time. It comes from Piketty and Saez's work on income inequality."
The open question at the time was what drove the increase — policy, globalization, or something else — and the earlier work did not say what the people at the top were actually doing
Holding pass-through income fixed answered it: more than half of the increase in income inequality from the late 1980s onward comes from pass-through business income
That pointed the research at privately held businesses and their owners rather than at public-company executives
3. Who Counts as Rich
The definition is a threshold and an exclusion, and Zidar said the argument does not depend on where the line is drawn.
"So what we did was we said anyone who has $5 million in net worth counts as an everywhere millionaire. In particular a private business owner who is outside of finance and tech."
The line could have been drawn far higher without changing the story: "Basically, as you go up the wealth distribution, the probability you own a private business increases. By the time you get to 100 million, it's basically everyone owns a private business."
"So we picked five million because it seemed like a material amount for the typical reader."
The population and the average: "So, 3 million roughly where we are today, private business owners have that 5 million plus net worth. That means their average net worth is around 25 million."
"So, you know, that's some walking around money as we like to say."
Zidar added a point aimed straight at the host's day job: much of that net worth sits in the illiquid operating company, so a wealth manager typically sees only the money the owner has taken out and put into public markets for diversification
The host opened the interview by reading the comparison out of the book: "But you say that collectively Main Street millionaires have more than 13 times the wealth of the Forbes 400."
4. The Whole Map Lights Up
The geography is the reason for the book's title, and the contrast was drawn against the list everyone already knows.
"If you take the Forbes 400, which is maybe the popular version of the wealth in America, put them on a map. They're mostly on those like four cities, five cities. More than half of them are in those five cities."
Doing the same exercise with their own group produces the opposite picture: "It's a reason we call them everywhere millionaires because the whole map lights up."
"They've got big houses. They have second houses in Aspen or on Lake of the Ozarks and stuff. So they're all over. So their abundance in number is just really striking and hard to wrap your mind around."
The World Cup came up as an accidental demonstration: visitors arriving in Kansas City and Texas posted about what they found, including Buc-ee's, the convenience store chain described as an enormous institution in Texas
"Look at the bounty of America. It's really amazing."
"And a lot of that just isn't in the day-to-day when you just read headlines about Bezos and Musk."
5. What 1986 Set Off
The single policy event the book turns on is the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and Zidar walked through what the country looked like before it.
In 1980 the typical American business was a C corporation: "So most public companies are C corporations and they face the corporate tax and if they pay it out to investors then individual investors will have to pay dividend tax."
The politics were a coalition of a president who had paid the old rates himself and a Democratic senator: "Reagan was president and he had a history before he was president and before he was governor of California as a kind of B-list movie actor"
Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, an NBA player before he was a senator, made common cause with him on bringing individual rates down
1986 pushed the top individual rate below the corporate rate for the first time, which made the pass-through form the cheaper way to own a business: "And so after the 80s and '86 in particular, there was this big revolution in how business was structured in America."
The vast majority of businesses, and the majority of profits, are now in pass-through form
Zwick's counterfactual is that without 1986 the money would have stayed inside the firm, spent on the company car, the spousal retreat and the vacation, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s when pulling cash out was expensive
"So an important part of the rise in their value is the lower tax burden that they face now than they faced in the 80s."
The second valuation driver is rates: "Another driver of rising valuations across the economy has been the fall in interest rates. Although in this moment we seem to be seeing a minor reversal in that." He said the effect is bigger on public companies whose cash flows sit further out
Zwick also pushed back on the idea that these are cash-flow-only stories: "If you focus on centimillionaires and above, so people with hundred million, two-thirds of that is in private business owners because they often hold it for decades and decades."
"And so even if they're cash flowing businesses, what they got it at and what it's marked at is very different than what it's worth today."
Zwick drew the contrast with the companies the market pays for growth: "For these operating businesses that we're talking about, you know, car dealers or dental practices or mid-market manufacturers, it's not about future profits." The value in SpaceX or Tesla, on his description, is expected future profits — should the Mars colony arrive
The host put it as a two-engine story — the cash flow these owners now keep, and the appreciation of the businesses themselves: "They created businesses that day-to-day make money, pay bills, employ people, and make those individuals, the 3 million, wealthier and wealthier through this tax reform."
6. Experience Beats Capital
Asked whether the tax change also produced the entrepreneurs, the answer separated the money from the mechanism.
Zidar's data covers everyone who started a business: "There's 10 million of them in America since 2000."
The tax rate is not what he thinks decides it: "I think what really mattered more was your early labor market experience and getting people exposure to the types of businesses that put you on a path to after working in the industry for 10 years, you're able to, you know, start one yourself or somebody's retiring, you can get some financing and buy it from them."
"And that's really a key part of success."
On the money itself, he said that keeping 80% rather than 70% of a large payoff is still a sizable thing, but that it is not the first-order factor
Zwick's answer on causation was that it cannot be cleanly separated: "It's kind of a chicken and egg." The wave might have happened anyway, and the tax change made it bigger
Three tailwinds sit underneath it, and the first is market access: "So globalization has both increased market access relative to what was available back then." He cited the fall of the Soviet Union and China's accession to the World Trade Organization opening up input markets for small firms, not only multinationals
The example is John Osher, who started a $5 electric toothbrush business in the late 1990s with fewer than ten people in the shop, used low-cost manufacturing from China, and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars
The domestic tailwind is deregulation and consolidation: "A similar tailwind that's happening more domestically is you have a wave of deregulation allowing you know cross-state competition and entry allowing businesses to kind of grow through acquisition across borders. That's not just a strategy of private equity."
"That's also a strategy of some of these everywhere millionaires to sort of buy up, you know, a beer distributor buys up another beer distributor when that person's retiring and doesn't have a successor to take it over."
Zidar's own word for the businesses is the one that recurs: "We call them unglamorous in a lot of ways." An HVAC repair shop with a few trucks is not a cocktail-party story, he said, though the bank statement may be
7. The Road Trip Method
The book is structured as a drive across the country, and the method for finding people who do not appear on any list was public records.
"We you know we found this guy through having a really nice house. So we looked at like property tax kind of records which are public information to find who has big houses in some of these markets that are you know off the beaten path."
The first stop is Natchez, Mississippi, and an antebellum house bought by a couple who like old houses: "We looked up, who is this guy? Oh, he started a seamless gutter manufacturer. His name's AB Walters."
The company is Senox, based in Texas, and Zwick read its positioning off its own website: "And on the website, they say seamless gutters, that's what we do. That's all we do."
Walters has a computer science degree and went into gutters after working at Sears and disliking the quality of the product
The last stop is Silicon Valley, told against type: "You're going to get insanely rich in 5 minutes by building an app. That's just not the model."
Zidar's Valley story is Nancy Mueller, the queen of quiche: "Instead, we tell the story of Nancy Mueller, who's the Queen of quiche, and she used to have Christmas parties and she used to freeze quiche and they were quite popular and she decided to slowly expand it and make more quiche at scale"
Scaling meant industrial problems, including hiring someone to wash spinach and drying it in a washer-dryer, and it took decades before she was comfortable with the scale
She sold the business and bought a superyacht named Andiamo, which Zidar translated as: we have been messing around, let's go
"That's another path to make a lot of money and that we just don't really think about it in the economy when we just have this intense focus on a handful of billionaires that are monopolizing all the attention."
The other stops named were Oklahoma City, suburban Fort Worth, Salt Lake City and Boulder, and Zwick said there were far more of these people in each place than the book had room to write about
8. The ABCs of Getting Rich
Asked which businesses were surprisingly lucrative, the answer came with a joke about a children's book and then a serious point about protection from competition.
The children's-book version of the research: "A is for auto dealers. B is for beer distributors and C is for contractors."
Auto dealers are near the top of the list when pass-through business income in the top 0.1% is added up, which is what prompted the question of why there are so many rich auto dealers
The answer given is that auto dealers are protected from competition in their local markets by franchise laws
They are also the clearest case of economic power converting into political power, which is where the conversation went later
The stories that did not make the book fill a spreadsheet: a man who repossesses cars in Nevada, and one they interviewed who distributes supplies for restaurant bathrooms — "There's a guy who was someone we talked to for the book who distributes supplies for bathrooms of restaurants."
"There's another guy who sells trash bag liners. And he became a literal treasure hunter from selling his trash bag company for $350 million."
Zwick's test for the phenomenon is a question anyone can run: ask who the richest person from your hometown or high school is, and the answer is the person who makes windows for drive-throughs or the plastic tips on shoelaces — "And it's really the story of how people are actually getting rich in America."
9. Starting Without Capital
The book's argument that initial capital is not the binding constraint is carried by one story in particular.
"So, one of the most inspiring stories we tell in the book is this person Karen Bentlage who started a series of tanning bed or tanning salons and then waxing salons."
"And she got her start I mean she was not coming from a family of great wealth at all and she didn't have a lot of money to put into the business initially."
She took a job with someone who had management experience, got mentorship from him, and then moved into selling and distributing tanning beds as the trend was starting
Rather than take the commission, she saved enough to buy a bed, put it in the back of a partner's salon and split the profits — "So take a little bit of risk but also see if I can turn a profit."
It worked immediately, and she scaled into her own salons while her mother was still pushing her toward nursing school
Her second act was a pivot inside the same skill set, from tanning to waxing, as health concerns about tanning became more salient
The lessons Zwick draws are about sequence rather than funding: "So again, that early labor market experience, accumulating, putting it to work, taking equity, not taking on too much debt, so that you've got some flexibility to pivot."
"Finding that kind of opportunity and just pursuing it and it's more about persistence and grit than the capital"
10. The Birth Lottery
On whether childhood predicts who gets there, the answer has a pessimistic half and an optimistic half, and Zidar gave both.
The favorite story in the book is Dick Portillo, who grew up in the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago, did not go to college and went into the Marines: "He went to the Marines and he didn't know how to make a hot dog or steam a hot dog bun before he started a little shack in the suburb of Chicago to sell hot dogs."
The stand had no running water — "He basically got $1,100 from himself, got some money from his brother, and was handing out little flyers on cars all around."
He took the dishes home and washed them in the family bathtub, which Zidar said left ketchup and mustard on it
"And to jump forward, he ended up selling the business several decades later for a billion dollars and sailing off in his yacht called the Top Dog, which is a great name for a yacht for someone with that story."
The pessimistic half is that the odds are not level: "So we like to say the odds are not even that you know if you lose the birth lottery that you're going to be a successful one."
The optimistic half is that the typical person at the top did not start there: "But I think the more optimistic take on it is the typical person who does rise to the top is not from one of those rich backgrounds. So there are far more of these successful stories from folks in the bottom 50 than there are in the top 1%."
"Immigrant populations are just more likely to generate entrepreneurs" — Portillo was a child of immigrants
Zwick added that background is not the only filter, and that a personality shows up repeatedly: "You do have to be kind of like a bit of a troublemaker, a bit of a grinder, a bit obsessed like both Karen and Dick were"
These businesses do not succeed immediately, he said, and the resilience to sit through years of stress is part of what is being selected for
The host's reading was that the hardship is the fuel, and that policy cannot produce founders to order: "We can't just assemble them based on a checklist or a blueprint." What can be built is a longer runway for the ones who appear
11. Passing It On
The host manages money for families with wealth across generations, and asked how much of this group inherited rather than built.
Zwick's answer starts with a joke and then a number: "I like to say the easiest way to get rich is to be born rich." He estimates 25 to 30% of the group are multigenerational family businesses, and that the typical one is self-made — started or bought and grown
The reason inheritance is harder here than in a portfolio: "Because operating that kind of asset is not the same thing as just collecting the coupons from the stock and bond portfolio that your parents left you."
The successful handover in the book is a father who moved his son through most parts of the business and then transferred a stake during COVID, when the valuation was temporarily low and the tax cost of the transfer was therefore lower
The failed one is a set of brothers with an attractive business who treated it as a family bank account rather than a family business, and the chapter draws the distinction between a business run by a family and a family business
A business being run badly by the next generation is an opening for a competitor, they noted, which is one way new owners get in
12. The Exit Options
Private equity is now the standing bid for these companies, and the answer was a list of exits rather than a verdict.
"So, one of the people we talked to is Tracy Britt Cool, who was a Warren Buffett protégée, who decided to leave Berkshire Hathaway to focus on investing in very much these types of businesses."
"And part of her pitch is that look, you don't have to lose the legacy of your business. I'm going to be a long-term investor. I'm not going to chop it up and you know fire half the employees."
The employee-ownership route: "Other people like Kim Jordan of New Belgium Brewing who we talk about in the book, she gave a stake to her employees and so if you're really concerned about the well-being of employees, some people turn to ESOPs."
The trade-off is priced: "You're not going to get as nearly as much money as if you sold it to private equity"
Zidar defended private equity as an exit on the grounds that it solves a real succession problem when the owner's children do not want the business, and said the outcome is not always the business being broken up for parts
The reason the bid exists at all is the size of the pool: "The growth of private capital market sort of like the flood of capital into private equity for example in the US specifically from like less than a billion dollars allocated in the 1980s to like you know trillions of dollars now going into private capital markets today because the returns are so much more attractive."
Where the model is being tested now is skilled services, because the data shows how much money doctors make: private equity is working out how to buy up medical practices
"It's not the same thing as applying a mid-market manufacturer and applying the private equity model because so much of the value is wrapped up in those doctors."
The downside case is told through the menu: "You know what does it look like when the private equity investor no longer wants to use the premium ingredients you know in the restaurant but wants to use the generic ingredients in the restaurant"
13. Power in Every District
The surprise that convinced them to write for a general audience rather than for other economists was political, and it came from advising work during the 2017 tax reform.
"So we had front row seats to 2017 tax reform through some of the advising work we were doing at the time" — where the academic ideas for good policy and the policymakers' ideas turned out to be very different
The explanation was in the membership of the House Ways and Means Committee, the tax-writing committee: three auto dealers sit on it, and a quarter of the committee are private business owners
"We compare that to you know, the general population, right? That's like an order of magnitude more in terms of representation of private business owners in that committee and in Congress more broadly."
"And that's a fascinating story that I think is very undertold that we try and explore in the book"
Zidar's version is geographic, and it is the second meaning of the book's title: "Another reason why we call the book the everywhere millionaire a second version of it is that there are these millionaires in every congressional district."
Passing anything needs a lot of members, and in each district these are the people playing golf with the senator, employing a lot of local people, raising money or turning out support
"And there are a lot of very big businesses that are kind of hiding behind the mantle of small business."
Zidar's reading of the regulations and protections is that some were not unreasonable when they were written, but have taken on a life of their own and may need trimming now that the justification no longer fits the economy
14. Not a Second Gilded Age
The host put the gilded-age comparison to them directly, and the answer was that the label points at the wrong people.
The book opens on a $60 million wedding: the family flew the guests to France, rented Versailles and had Maroon 5's Adam Levine sing the first-dance song, and the authors say it cost more than Jeff Bezos's second wedding
The source of the money is the point: "These were not monopolistic industrialists operating at massive scale such as you know Carnegie or Rockefeller like in the gilded age." They were "third generation car dealers from Coral Gables, Florida", not in the top 20 by volume of cars sold
"So, we call it the age of millionaires because we think, you know, they're really the ones that are walking around everywhere. And they have far more wealth and far more power than people appreciate."
"And I think the gilded age creates the wrong image because it says, you know, this is like a small group of people that, you know, are running these huge mega industries"
The similarities were conceded rather than dismissed: the top 0.1% wealth share series begin in 1913 and 1916, and the level is back near where it started, the famous U-shape, with conspicuous consumption echoing the second- and third-generation Vanderbilts
The difference is the capital intensity of the economy: "It's you know you can make a ton of money with a laptop and a few lawyers."
"Some of them are making $5 million a year in income. And, you know, that is just not like what the gilded age is really about. Like really rich lawyers in every town in America."
15. Move Slow and Make Things
The closing question was what a reader should do differently, and the answer was split by who is reading.
"So, I think of like three audiences for the book or like ways that people might enjoy it."
For someone who wants to build one of these businesses, Zwick's advice is to start from an asset already owned — a problem identified through prior experience — and then to be patient about profitability and run a series of escalating experiments as the business goes to market
The obstacle he names is the clock everyone is now on: "But you know I think folks are really impatient right now kind of like the you know the social media and the phones and everything just cause us to sort of want to get there tomorrow."
The phrase he wants readers to take from the stories is the inverse of the Silicon Valley slogan: move slow and make things
The second audience is the reader who has no intention of starting anything and simply wants to see the economy as it is
Zidar's hope is narrower and more practical — that widening the frame makes it look attainable, and that a reader notices the local business whose owner is retiring: "You know, it can hopefully spark conversations and put people in a place where, you know, they might be on the path to become one of these everywhere millionaires."
Bonus Insights
Baranowski manages money for wealthy families and said the book showed him a world he did not know. His own version of the finding comes from driving across the country: as a public-market investor he knows the listed companies, and almost none of the economic activity he passes belongs to any of them
The pair wrote an excerpt of the book for The Wall Street Journal, published under the headline The American Dream Is Alive. And It's Minting Millionaires., with a photograph of Dick Portillo on it
Zidar said many of the people in the book appear under pseudonyms, so readers will never know who they are
Zwick said they wrote the book to be read rather than displayed, with colorful stories and wordplay, which is an unusual brief for two academic economists
The host's own show opens with a disclosure that nothing in it is investment advice, and he describes Talking Billions as a program about money that keeps ending up on what a rich life beyond money looks like
Their bottom line is that the real money in America sits in 3 million privately held operating businesses whose owners were made wealthy by a tax change in 1986, ordinary industries and decades of reinvestment — and that the group is powerful enough to keep the rules that made it, precisely because nobody is looking at it.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
The Forbes 400 (The benchmark the whole book argues against — half of it lives in four or five cities, and the authors say Main Street millionaires collectively hold more than 13 times its wealth)
Senox (The Texas seamless-gutter manufacturer started by A.B. Walters, found through the property tax records on his house in Natchez, Mississippi)
Portillo's (Dick Portillo's hot dog business, started with $1,100 in a shack with no running water and sold decades later for a billion dollars)
Buc-ee's (The Texas convenience store chain Zwick uses as an example of the American scale that visitors notice and residents do not)
Berkshire Hathaway (Where Tracy Britt Cool worked before leaving to invest in exactly these private operating businesses, pitching owners on keeping the legacy intact)
New Belgium Brewing (Kim Jordan's brewery, the book's example of selling to employees through an ESOP instead of to private equity)
SpaceX and Tesla (The contrast case — companies valued on expected future profits, against operating businesses valued on the cash they throw off today)
House Ways and Means Committee (The tax-writing committee where three auto dealers sit and a quarter of the members are private business owners)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There – Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick (The book the interview is about, built on the first database linking confidential tax records to individual business owners)
The American Dream Is Alive. And It's Minting Millionaires. – Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick (Their excerpt of the book in The Wall Street Journal, which tells the Dick Portillo story)
Piketty and Saez's work on income inequality (The source of the top 1% income share chart that started the research, and the thing their pass-through finding re-explains)
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