**Who Is Actually Wealthy in America, and How Did They Get Rich?**
America is a far wealthier nation than most people realize—and that wealth is distributed very differently than the popular imagination suggests. In their new book *The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There*, Princeton economist Owen Zidar and University of Chicago economist Eric Zwick draw on a massive, first-of-its-kind database of IRS tax records to reveal a picture of American wealth that upends conventional wisdom. The research, which began as a Treasury Department project linking pass-through businesses to their owners and workers, produced a panel dataset far richer than traditional surveys like the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. It allows researchers to trace every business created since 2000, follow founders over time, and break down wealth by industry, geography, and zip code. What they found is that top wealth and income are „much more abundant, and also closer to home for more people, than we previously thought.”
The book’s central finding is captured in its title: the wealthy are everywhere. Rather than being concentrated on the coasts or confined to tech and finance, top wealth lights up the entire country. Zidar and Zwick identify roughly 3 million „everywhere millionaires”—private business owners with net worth of at least $5 million who collectively hold more than ten times the combined wealth of the Forbes 400. These are not celebrity billionaires but owners of auto dealerships, HVAC companies, dental and medical practices, restaurants, distributors, sanitation firms, laundromats, and car washes. The reason this group is so consistently underestimated is that private businesses have no obligation to disclose financials the way public companies do, and media attention has overwhelmingly focused on a handful of famous billionaires. „Unsexy is sexy to me,” the authors quote NBA player Russell Westbrook saying of such businesses—and the data backs him up.
Perhaps the most important mechanism behind American wealth creation is the distinction between earning and owning. At the 90th percentile of income, most money comes from salaries; but by the top 0.1%, the majority of income flows from business ownership. The rise of pass-through entities—businesses taxed at the individual owner’s rate rather than the corporate level—has been central to this shift. The 1986 bipartisan tax reform, which lowered personal rates below corporate rates for the first time, made pass-through status advantageous, and subsequent changes cemented the trend. Today more than half of all business income and nearly half of employment comes from pass-throughs. According to the authors, holding pass-through importance fixed at its 1985 level would eliminate roughly half the rise in top 1% income share, and two-thirds of wealth growth among the top 0.1% since 1989 traces to private business ownership. Business ownership, in short, is the primary engine of American wealth accumulation.
Importantly, the book also confronts survivorship bias head-on. Tracking roughly 10 million business founding events since 2000, Zidar and Zwick find that founders earn about 10% more on average than comparable workers who never started a business—and that includes the failures. About 20% of founders are serial entrepreneurs, meaning the second or third venture is often the one that produces real wealth. This reflects a distinctly American tolerance for failure: unlike in Europe, where a failed venture can be a lasting black mark, in the U.S. failure is treated as part of the learning process. The authors describe the typical path as „move slow and make things”—decades of domain expertise, not a quick-hit app. Because these owners are visible, employ many people, and enjoy higher public approval than Congress or the Supreme Court, they also carry outsized political clout: about a quarter of members of Congress are private business owners, and the share climbs at state and local levels.
For anyone hoping to join this cohort, the data points to a clear conclusion. A strong salary helps, but the surest route to the top tier of American wealth is owning equity, not merely earning income—and the most common way to do that is to buy into or build an unglamorous, cash-generating private business and hold onto it for decades. With a wave of baby-boomer owners now approaching retirement and many lacking successors, opportunities to acquire established businesses through seller financing may be the most underappreciated path to wealth in America today.
Ez a cikk a Neural News AI (V1) verziójával készült.
Forrás: https://ritholtz.com/2026/09/atm-who-is-wealthy-in-usa/.