13 Times the Forbes 400: The Hidden Millionaires Behind Main Street

Roughly 3 million Americans hold private fortunes averaging $25 million each — and together they control more than 13 times the wealth of the Forbes 400. That's the central finding of "The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There," a new book by Owen Zidar of Princeton and Eric Zwick of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, built on more than a decade of analyzing anonymized tax returns with researchers at the U.S. Treasury.

The two professors call these owners "Everywhere Millionaires," and their profile breaks with almost every popular assumption about American wealth.

Who are the Everywhere Millionaires?

Start with Bob and Paula Brockway of Coral Gables, Florida. In November 2023, the couple — car dealers, not tech founders — hosted what the press dubbed "the wedding of the century" for their daughter Madelaine. The bill came to $60 million.

The guest list tells you the scale: guests flown in by private jet, a rehearsal dinner at the Paris Opera House, fireworks at the Eiffel Tower, a dinner at the Palace of Versailles served by dozens of waiters in period costume, and a private concert by Adam Levine of Maroon 5.

The Brockways aren't outliers. Zidar and Zwick note that for every public company CEO making headlines, roughly 1,000 business owners worth at least $25 million operate in near-total obscurity. They don't cluster on the coasts, either — they live in places like Dothan, Alabama, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. They coach your kid's soccer team, sit next to you at fundraisers, or work as your dentist.

The takeaway: the famous names — Jamie Dimon, Taylor Swift, the Rockefellers, Elon Musk — represent a small slice of who is actually wealthy in America.

Why did it take tax data to see them?

Rich people don't answer surveys. That simple fact has distorted the public picture of American wealth for decades, which has been shaped instead by news reports, public company executive pay and celebrity earnings.

Zidar and Zwick worked with U.S. Treasury researchers on a systematic assessment of everyone in America based on anonymized tax returns. "We discovered a quiet revolution that has unfolded since the 1980s," they write.

The trigger, in their account: Ronald Reagan cut tax rates for individuals while raising them for traditional companies. Those changes set off an explosion of pass-through businesses — S corporations and partnerships whose profits and losses flow directly to their owners.

The numbers are stark:

• Pass-throughs now account for 95% of all businesses in America.
• They account for the majority of the rise of the top 1% since the 1980s.
• Because paper trails link these businesses to individual owners, they are uniquely traceable in tax data — which is what let the researchers map a previously invisible world.

Their one-line verdict: the American wealth conversation has been "missing the forest of entrepreneurs for a few redwoods in Silicon Valley."

What kind of businesses build these fortunes?

Deliberately unglamorous ones. The authors point to gutter manufacturing, garage-door companies, auto dealerships and beverage distribution — what they call Main Street businesses.

"You can be wildly successful doing ordinary things," they argue. "You don't have to be a genius, you don't have to have gone to a fancy school, and you don't have to live on the coast."

That framing carries into mobility data. Dick Portillo, who grew up in a Chicago housing project, never attended college and had never cooked a hot dog before he started selling them — and became a billionaire doing it. "His story is striking, but it isn't exceptional," the authors write.

The data backs the claim. Among children who grew up in the bottom 20% of the income distribution and reached the top 20%, about 10% got there by owning a business. Only 1.3% got there by attending an elite college.

In plain terms: for upward mobility in America, business ownership beats the elite-college path by roughly eight to one.

Do these millionaires shape policy?

Yes, and largely unnoticed. Business owners hold congressional seats at roughly 10 times their share of the population, according to the book, and they're heavily represented in state and local government as well.

Because they're less visible than tech billionaires or Wall Street executives, the authors argue, their policy influence flies under the radar. Substantial tax and regulatory benefits flow to private business owners — benefits that rarely surface in public debate, in part because most people don't realize how large and consequential the group is.

Understanding who the Everywhere Millionaires are, and what they want from government, is — in the authors' words — essential to understanding how American economic policy actually gets made.

The bigger so-what: if Zidar and Zwick are right, the next decade of tax debates won't just be about tech and Wall Street. They'll be about car dealers, garage-door makers and beverage distributors — a 3-million-strong ownership class that writes rules most Americans never knew existed.