The Wealthiest—and Stealthiest—Class in America
Billionaires have never been more central to the cultural and political conversation, more impressed with themselves, or more consumed with a sense of their own victimhood. From “Billions” and “Succession” to the latest social-media spasms of Musk or Ackman or Arnault, billionaires offer a grim and garish spectacle from which it’s hard to look away, and, let’s admit it, we often don’t. That’s understandable: there are more of them, and they’re richer than ever. In 2025, to get onto the Forbes list of the top four hundred American billionaires, you needed a cool $3.8 billion. The average wealth of that group was $16.5 billion, and their collective net worth was $6.6 trillion. There were another five hundred American billionaires who didn’t even make the list.
This is an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power among the super-rich. When we talk about wealth, we mainly talk about billionaires. But what if that’s not the most important truth about wealth in America? What if there were another group that, without drawing much attention, had grown collectively thirteen times richer than the Forbes 400? And that was even more effective at using its financial-political clout? And what if a typical member of that class looked less like Logan Roy and more like this:
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It was percipient of John Updike to latch on to the car dealership as the foundation of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s Everyman prosperity in his tetralogy of novels. As Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick show in their brilliant new study, “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There” (Holt), the car dealer—Rabbit, or Buddy Garrity in “Friday Night Lights,” or Daniel LaRusso, the grownup Karate Kid, in “Cobra Kai”—is a true archetype of American wealth. Car dealer, beer-distribution magnate, partner in a medical practice or a law firm: these ordinary, ubiquitous business owners represent a collective prosperity at least as consequential as the ascendancy of the billionaire, only much less conspicuous. “In a sense,” Zidar and Zwick argue, “Main Street Millionaires are hiding in plain sight. The supermarket where you shop, the restaurant where you order a burger, and the convenience store where you buy gas, newspapers, and coffee may all be parts of huge chains that have made their founders very rich.”
Zidar and Zwick got onto this story through their work for the Treasury at the Office of Tax Analysis, which studies the impact of tax legislation, actual and prospective. The two young economists, from Berkeley and Harvard, respectively, were assigned the task of finding out how much tax business owners pay. That might sound straightforward—might, indeed, sound like the kind of thing the government should already know—but the tax code is complicated, and the I.R.S.’s various databases are thoroughly siloed and anonymized. To answer the question, they and another colleague set about finding who owned businesses, connecting those business records with individual taxpayers. It was a complicated process involving years of work, and they more than earned the endearingly nerdy, self-appointed nickname the Tax Ninjas. They discovered what comes close to being a new class in America, the “everywhere millionaire” of their title. There are a lot of them: nearly five million households with a net worth of at least five million dollars; more than two million decamillionaires, worth at least ten million; and around sixty-five thousand centimillionaires, worth a hundred million and up. The sheer mass of these numbers means that, in Zidar and Zwick’s words, in contemporary America, for all the fuss around billionaires, “these are the real rich.”
For an explanation of how they got that way, we need a brief detour into the tax code. The modern federal income tax, authorized by a constitutional amendment in 1913, began with a top rate of seven per cent and was dramatically expanded to help finance the First World War. Its top rate later rose from twenty-five per cent, in 1925, to ninety-four per cent, during the Second World War. Corporation tax, introduced in 1909, followed a similar trajectory, peaking at fifty-three per cent in 1968. By the time Ronald Reagan became President, in 1981, the top rates of income and corporation tax stood at seventy and forty-six per cent, respectively.
Republicans in Congress wanted to cut taxes, and Democrats wanted to simplify the tax code. The outcome was the bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986, which did both. In the process, the bill introduced a novelty in American history by leaving the top rate of corporation tax, thirty-four per cent, higher than the top rate of federal income tax, twenty-eight per cent. At the same time, the bill boosted the allure of a special-enterprise category: the “pass-through,” in which a business passes its net income through to the tax returns of individual owners, who pay the lower individual rate of tax, rather than the higher corporate rate, while avoiding dividend taxes. One bookkeeping expert quoted by Zidar and Zwick calls owning a small business “the best tax deal in America.”
That is who the everywhere millionaires are: owners of pass-through businesses. These businesses are everywhere, and they do pretty much everything. Our image of wealth skews glamorous and coastal. These businesses and their owners don’t. Some of the firms are well known, part of the familiar roadside furniture of American life—Buc-ee’s, Bass Pro Shops. There are many, many more, and the catalogue of what they do and where they do it is a Whitmanian portrait of capitalism: the “world’s largest mozzarella maker,” Texas’s largest supplier of seamless gutters, “the biggest in the world in the high-end skiwear market,” gas-and-convenience-megastore tycoons, a “massive family-owned supplier of door handles,” “a company that just stored documents for medical and financial firms,” makers of car parts, bakers of hamburger buns, distributors of toilet paper, a tanning-bed mogul who pivoted to waxing when she realized that tanning was going out of fashion.
As for what the people who own these businesses are like, Zidar and Zwick give both a statistical summary and individual portraits. Statistically, the mean pass-through decamillionaire is a white, college-educated, sixty-two-year-old man—older than one might expect, because these businesses take a while to build. (He’s also unusually likely to be married: the average for the general population is around fifty per cent, but among this cohort it is ninety.) We all know people who are laid-back, curious about lots of different things, and have a good work-life balance. These small-business owners are not like that. They tend toward monomania. Their days are, in Zidar and Zwick’s words, “full, busy, and mundane.” They usually own only one business, and they dedicate themselves to it unrelentingly, with few outside interests or hobbies, a high tolerance for risk, and little appetite for work-life balance. (Rabbit Angstrom wasn’t like that, but Rabbit Angstrom didn’t stay rich.)
The portraits in “The Everywhere Millionaire” are vivid. In 1976, Nancy Mueller’s young children were enrolled in school in California, and she was on her way to play tennis when she stopped and asked herself where she wanted to be in a decade: to be better at tennis, or to be doing something else? “I wanted to have something to show for the next ten years,” she recalled. “I wanted to make it count.” She went into business making frozen miniature quiches, “leasing space from a dilapidated empanada factory that was vacant while the owner served time in jail.” Mueller adapted a washing machine to take water out of spinach and had her production equipment improved by an aerospace engineer who had left the industry in protest of the Vietnam War; soon, she was making a hundred thousand mini quiches a day. What she wasn’t making yet was profit—“you’re shipping dollar bills with every case of quiche,” her accountant father told her. Her big break came in 1983, when Price Club placed a large order, followed by other warehouse stores. By the late nineteen-nineties, she had an eighty-six-thousand-square-foot production facility and was making fifty million dollars in sales, seemingly undeterred by the tragic loss of her husband to suicide in 1994. At one point, she said, the business earned an eighteen-per-cent pre-tax profit margin. Worried that the warehouse stores would suddenly drop her products one day, as they are known to do, she sold the business to a leveraged-buyout firm in 1999 and retired, in Zidar and Zwick’s words, to “sail off into the sunset,” aboard her superyacht, the Andiamo.
A different energy attaches to the story of another pass-through business owner, Dick Portillo. He grew up poor, in a rough Chicago housing project, and joined the Marines in 1957, seven days after graduating from high school. He liked fighting. On his first date with his future wife, “he took her to a lake but told her that he had to participate in a rumble there.” In 1963, with a family to support, exhausted and injured from manual labor, he decided, “I had to figure something out. I had to create a future for us.” Portillo thought he had spotted something: Chicago was famous for hot dogs, but its suburbs were short of places to buy them. He opened his first hot-dog stand in a discount-store parking lot in a homemade six-by-twelve trailer.
Many adventures later, Portillo sold his business to private equity, his chain of thirty-eight restaurants and two commissaries valued at a cool billion. (He came to regret it. Portillo was bored by retirement.) The valuation reflected an astonishing fact: where a successful McDonald’s could have a turnover of three million dollars a year, a Portillo’s could turn over nine million. We get a glimpse of how Portillo’s got so successful in the story of how he fended off competition from a rival, Ditka Dogs, set up by the beloved local figure Mike Ditka, the head coach of the Chicago Bears. According to Portillo, Ditka’s team had poached one of his managers. A few days before the restaurant was due to open, Portillo invited the manager to see him. “I told him that he did what every man, every leader of the house, every bread-winner would do.” Portillo began taking money out of his pockets and putting it on the table in front of him. “There was about $12,000 on the table now. I told him it was all his if he did one more thing.” Ditka’s new restaurant was opening on Saturday. The “one more thing”—in addition to coming back to Portillo’s for higher pay and convincing the other employees who had been hired away to do the same—was to quit on Friday. “Portillo attended the grand opening and sat with a cup of coffee to watch the mess unfold.” The reason you’ve never been to a branch of Ditka Dogs is that the company no longer exists. The name of Portillo’s yacht? Top Dog.
The common thread in “The Everywhere Millionaire” is not dazzling innovation. Anyone might have thought to make a fortune from quiche, or hot dogs, or human-resource management, or office supplies, or convenience stores, or gas stations. The secret ingredient is no secret: it’s the sheer remorselessness, ingenuity, and resilience of the business owners.
If that were all there was to the everywhere-millionaire story, we could celebrate it as an example of how non-crony capitalism is supposed to work, a meritocratic free-for-all. Unfortunately, there is a shadow side. As Zidar and Zwick argue, their protagonists, for all their virtues, are also “central characters in the saga of rising inequality.” Between 1980 and 2024, the share of national income going to American workers is estimated to have declined from sixty-five per cent to fifty-six per cent, meaning that “nine cents of every dollar that a firm creates that used to go to workers now goes to firm owners.” There have been increases in productivity, remarkable ones. The authors, surveying “top-owned firms,” report a recent rise in labor productivity from thirty-four thousand dollars a year to fifty-two thousand dollars a year. If the annual proceeds had been shared equally, that eighteen-thousand-dollar increase would have meant nine thousand dollars each. Instead, fifteen thousand dollars has gone to owners and three thousand dollars to workers. The so-called Gilded Age and the years following saw huge income disparities; in the early twentieth century, the highest-earning one per cent of households earned eighteen per cent of all income, and the bottom ninety per cent earned sixty per cent. The equivalent numbers in 2022 are worse: twenty per cent and around fifty per cent.
Social mobility has also declined. Poor children born in 1940 had about a ninety per cent chance of earning more than their parents. The chance for those children born in 1980 was closer to seventy per cent. According to a 2014 analysis, the chance of moving from the bottom fifth to the top fifth of earners was 7.5 per cent. Turn this around, and it means that if you were born in that bottom fifth, you could be 92.5 per cent sure that you wouldn’t get to the top fifth. “The chance of making it to the top as a poor kid in the twenty-first century is about half of what it was at the beginning of the twentieth,” Zidar and Zwick write. That means that the richest and most powerful country in the world has seen a dramatic and dispiriting decline in opportunity for the less well off.
The link between inequality and the everywhere millionaire runs through politics. Entrepreneurship is important for upward economic mobility: nine per cent of those who made the transition from the bottom fifth to the top fifth are entrepreneurs; only 1.3 per cent attended élite universities. But that rise is harder than it used to be. The pass-through owners are very active in politics, both at the federal level—where decamillionaires hold twelve per cent of congressional seats, despite representing less than one per cent of the U.S. population—and at the state level, which, Zidar and Zwick point out, is another huge focus of lobbying money. A consistent theme in their political activity has been to pull up the drawbridge and make it harder for new entrepreneurs to get rich in the same ways.
The free-market economy of the U.S. has, when you look closely, a remarkable number of restrictive practices, many of them concentrated in industries where the Main Street Millionaires got rich. Beer distribution—the highly lucrative and highly protected intermediary industry between brewers and bars—is one. Car dealerships are another. In both cases, legal protections designed to defend the little guy against bullies—the brewers, the car manufacturers—ended up creating a new category of bully. The same logic extends to the labor market. Around eighteen per cent of American workers, one survey found, are bound by non-compete agreements. It is hard to see why a janitor should need one, unless you run a company that supplies janitorial services. As Rabbit’s son explains to him, the secret to wealth in America is that “you just get yourself in the right position and it comes.”
Realtors have also done a sensational job of defending their throne. “While 90 percent of homebuyers now find properties online, nearly 90 percent of them still use agents to buy their homes,” Zidar and Zwick write. Agents typically collect a five to six per cent commission rate per sale. That comes to about a hundred billion dollars a year. Uncoincidentally, the National Association of Realtors “spent more on federal lobbying than any other U.S. company or organization during the 2024 electoral cycle.”
Doctors are heavily represented among Main Street Millionaires and have the political clout to show for it. Doctors’ lobbying organizations, fearing a glut of clinicians, fought for limits on the number being trained, and the 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped the residency positions for which most teaching hospitals could receive Medicare funding at roughly their 1996 levels. “By 2017, the number of doctors per thousand people in the United States was 2.6, nearly 30 percent lower than the average of 3.5 in other advanced economies,” Zidar and Zwick write.
Organized medicine also fought efforts to restrain what Medicare paid physicians. A formula introduced in 1997, the Sustainable Growth Rate, was meant to keep Medicare spending on doctors from outrunning the economy. It produced a 4.8-per-cent cut in physician payment rates in 2002 and called for at least another round of cuts thereafter. Congress repeatedly postponed those cuts in what became known as the annual “doc fix,” until a bipartisan law signed by President Obama in 2015 abolished the formula.
Perhaps the biggest single accomplishment of concerted Main Street Millionaire lobbying came with President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate considerably below the top individual rate. Led by Senator Ron Johnson, who co-founded and held shares in a plastics company—“I just have in my heart a real affinity for these owner-operated pass-throughs”—the effort produced a new rule allowing eligible pass-through owners to deduct up to twenty per cent of their qualified business income. The cost to the federal government during the next ten years was estimated at four hundred and fifteen billion dollars. The victory proved durable. In 2025, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act made permanent and enhanced the pass-through deduction even as it phased out federal tax credits for clean vehicles, a blow to Elon Musk. It’s difficult to argue with Zidar and Zwick’s conclusion that “the obsession with Big Banks, Big Oil, and Big Tech . . . diverts attention from how much local market power Main Street Millionaires and their so-called small businesses have amassed, as well as the social costs of policies that protect their power.”
Zidar and Zwick have some suggestions for how to change this. You might expect them to emphasize access to capital and to higher education, especially for the minority groups they show to be underrepresented among Main Street Millionaires. Instead, they stress connections, networks, and early exposure to entrepreneurs. With starting a business, as with so much else, seeing someone do it makes you likelier to do it yourself.
On inequality more generally, their prescriptions are similar to everyone else’s—reform health insurance, raise the minimum wage, share more profits with workers. That such proposals, far from outlandish, seem so unlikely to be enacted is itself a measure of how far the center of policy debate has shifted. In the short term, the best we can probably do about this concentration of wealth and power is see it and name it, and that’s what Zidar and Zwick have done. I suspect we will be hearing much more about their work and its implications. Rabbit would be displeased. “I don’t think about politics,” he once said. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.” ♦