The Everywhere Millionaires: The 3 Million Business Owners Who Out-Rank the Forbes 400
The Million Dollar Question: Economists Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar estimate that the roughly 3 million private business owners they call “Everywhere Millionaires” collectively hold about how much more wealth than the entire Forbes 400 combined?
A) About the same B) 2 times more C) 5 times more D) 10 to 13 times moreRead on for the answer.
Every year, the Forbes 400 gets the headlines — 400 names, a leaderboard, a lot of Musk and Bezos. A decade-long research project using Treasury tax records says that list is nowhere close to where most of America’s serious money actually sits. The real concentration of ownership wealth, it turns out, is in car dealerships, law firms, welding-supply stores, and oil outfits you’ve never heard of — and there are millions of them, not hundreds.
What it is
“Everywhere Millionaire” is the term economists Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar coined for a population their research had been quietly mapping for more than ten years: roughly 3 million American business owners, outside tech and finance, each worth at least $5 million, who built that wealth running ordinary operating companies rather than riding a public stock, a venture fund, or a Silicon Valley exit. Their book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, pulls this population out of IRS administrative data most researchers never get to touch — the kind of records that can actually track who owns what, rather than relying on self-reported surveys or public filings.
The scale is the headline. Princeton economist Angus Deaton’s blurb on the book puts the base number plainly: “there are five million households who have more than five million dollars each.” Narrow that to the business-owner subset specifically, and CBS News reported the group’s combined wealth runs to roughly 13 times that of the entire Forbes 400 — a list Zwick has pointed out represents only 3% to 5% of total U.S. household wealth to begin with. Other outlets covering the same research land closer to a 10x multiple, depending on exactly which slice of owners and which year of data they’re citing — the honest version of the number is “somewhere around 10 to 13 times,” not a single decimal-precise figure.
Who they are
This is not the Forbes 400’s cast of characters. The demographic profile of the $10 million-plus “decamillionaire” subset Zwick and Zidar studied skews older and far less visible than the household names: median age 62, about 90% married, and — contrary to the stereotype of the self-made dropout — roughly 80% hold a college degree, with 40% holding an advanced degree like an MBA, MD, JD, or PhD. They are disproportionately male and white, a pattern the research ties partly to who starts businesses in the first place rather than to any single explanation.
Industry concentration tells its own story. The top five sources of this kind of wealth are legal services, financial and investment activities (think boutique advisory and investment firms, not hedge fund billionaires), auto dealerships, professional and technical/consulting services, and oil and gas extraction. None of that is glamorous. All of it is the kind of business that shows up in every mid-size American city, which is rather the point of the “everywhere” in the name — this wealth isn’t concentrated in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street; it’s distributed across the country, one law firm or dealership group at a time.
Why this group changes the picture
The Forbes 400 functions, culturally, as a stand-in for “how rich can a person get in America.” That’s always been a little misleading, since it only counts 400 people by definition. What the Zwick-Zidar research adds is a sense of scale: a population nearly 10,000 times larger than the Forbes 400’s headcount, holding roughly $50 trillion against the Forbes 400’s approximately $5 trillion, by one accounting — Entrepreneur’s coverage put the total figure closer to $65 trillion, a reminder that estimates of a population this large and this hard to survey will move depending on methodology and year. As Zidar put it directly, “we estimate that there are around 3 million ‘Everywhere Millionaires’ who are business owners outside of tech and finance who have at least $5 million.”
Zwick has framed the finding as a corrective to where the public imagination puts “rich” people: “this is not just a story about wealth being on the coast, Silicon Valley and finance. This is a much broader phenomenon, and also much closer to home.” The practical upshot for anyone trying to understand American wealth is that the Forbes 400 — for all the attention it gets — is closer to a trivia category than a map of where the money actually lives.
The research also landed at an interesting moment for how outlets cover wealth. Coverage framed the finding as a counter-narrative almost immediately — Entrepreneur ran with “Millionaires Like Dick Portillo Are Expanding ‘Ordinary’ Businesses,” while NPR’s Planet Money picked up the same research under the headline “Middlegarchs are the new Oligarchs,” a wink at how unglamorous this tier of wealth looks next to the word “oligarch.” The repetition across outlets in a single month is itself a small data point: this is a finding that surprised a lot of people who assumed they already knew where American wealth lived.
How they actually got there
The founding story breaks down more evenly than most readers would guess. Among the business owners studied, 46% founded their company from scratch, 32% bought an existing business, and roughly 25% got it through inheritance or a family transfer (about 7% inherited outright, with the rest arriving as a gift or transfer short of full inheritance). That means “trust fund kid takes over the family business” describes a real but minority slice of this population — most of these fortunes were built or bought, not handed down intact.
Two named examples show the range. Stewart Horejsi, who ran a welding-supply business in Kansas, put about $94,300 into Berkshire Hathaway stock across three purchases in 1980 — 40 shares at $265, then 60 more at $295, then 200 more at $330 — and essentially never sold. Forbes’ real-time tracker now puts his net worth at roughly $4.1 billion, good for No. 379 on the 2026 Forbes 400. And Dick Portillo opened his first hot dog stand in 1963 with $1,100 in starting capital, grew it into the Portillo’s restaurant chain, and sold the company to Berkshire Partners in 2014 for nearly $1 billion; Forbes now estimates his fortune at more than $1 billion after he diversified into real estate and other assets.
It’s worth pausing on that last point, because it matters for how to read this whole piece honestly: both Horejsi and Portillo are no longer “Everywhere Millionaires” in the strict $5M–$25M sense the research describes — they’re billionaires, the tail of an already unusual tail. They show up in coverage of this research because they’re the most dramatic illustrations of the mechanism (patient compounding, a business built and sold), not because they’re representative of the median $5 million to $25 million owner the data is actually describing.
What it takes
There’s no entry fee in the traditional sense — no account minimum, no membership application. What it actually takes is time and risk tolerance measured in decades, and most people who try don’t get there. Of Dollars and Data’s breakdown of the underlying research puts a hard number on that: only about 5% of founders build a firm past $5 million in value within ten years, and roughly half of all firms stop operating as independent entities within five years of being founded.
That’s the piece most retellings of this story leave out. The Dave Ramsey-run National Study of Millionaires — a different, broader survey of 10,000+ millionaires, measured at the $1 million-plus net worth level rather than the $5 million-plus “Everywhere Millionaire” threshold — found engineers, accountants, teachers, people in management, and attorneys topping the list of most common millionaire occupations. That’s a genuinely more attainable, more middle-class path than business ownership at the $5M-plus level, and it’s a different dataset answering a related but distinct question: how most $1 million-plus savers got there (steady saving and investing in ordinary jobs) versus how this specific $5 million-plus-through-business-ownership cohort got there (founding, buying, or inheriting an operating company).
Hidden costs and the survivorship problem
The sharpest pushback on the “Everywhere Millionaire” framing doesn’t dispute the numbers — it disputes the moral of the story. In a piece titled “The Illusion of the ‘Everywhere Millionaire,’” psychologist Arturo Hernandez argues that highlighting success stories like Portillo’s — “the far end of the tail,” as he puts it — creates a misleading sense of how replicable this path is. His core complaint about the research’s framing: it traces successful founders backward to ask where they came from, rather than asking forward “how many people also went down the same path and were not successful.” Given that roughly a third of businesses survive even ten years, per his accounting, and Portillo’s lasted fifty, treating any single success story as a blueprint risks confusing an exceptional outcome with a typical one. His blunt summary: “don’t take life-changing advice based on a story in the Wall Street Journal.”
That critique sits comfortably alongside the research itself rather than contradicting it — Zwick and Zidar’s data on the 5%-past-$5-million and roughly-50%-five-year-survival rates already shows the odds are long. The tension is really about emphasis: is the headline “there’s $50 trillion in overlooked ordinary-business wealth” (true, and a real corrective to coastal-tech-and-finance thinking) or “here’s how you personally could build $5 million running a business” (a much shakier promise, given how many people try and don’t make it)?
There’s also a tax-structure wrinkle worth naming plainly: business owners who take income through a pass-through entity are often taxed differently — and in many cases more favorably — than someone earning the same amount as W-2 wages, a point raised in coverage of this research and a recurring thread in how pass-through business wealth gets built and preserved. That’s a structural advantage layered on top of the already-long odds of building a successful business in the first place.
What people get wrong
The biggest misconception is geographic and cultural: that “rich” in America means Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or a handful of recognizable tech founders. The data says the opposite — the much larger pool of serious wealth sits in unglamorous, geographically distributed businesses, which is exactly why Zwick picked the word “everywhere” rather than naming a place.
The second misconception runs the other direction: assuming this is accessible, broadly replicable wealth just because it’s not Silicon Valley wealth. It still requires founding or buying a business that survives and grows for years against odds where most attempts fail, in industries (legal services, auto dealerships, oil and gas) that themselves require capital, licensing, or expertise most people don’t have standing start.
The third misconception is about inheritance. It’s tempting to assume any $10 million-plus business owner inherited their position. The data says roughly three-quarters did not — the founded-it/bought-it split (46%/32%) dwarfs the inherited-it share (about 25%, and only 7% as a clean inheritance rather than a gift or transfer).
And the fourth, specific to this piece: treating Dick Portillo or Stewart Horejsi as typical “Everywhere Millionaires” rather than what they actually are now — billionaires, cited because their stories are dramatic and well-documented, not because they represent the median $5 million to $25 million owner this research is actually about.
Bottom line
Final Answer: D — 10 to 13 times more. Depending on which cut of the Zwick-Zidar research you look at, the roughly 3 million American business owners they call “Everywhere Millionaires” hold somewhere between 10 and 13 times the combined wealth of the entire Forbes 400. The honest takeaway isn’t “anyone can do this” — the founding-success and five-year-survival numbers say otherwise — but it is a real correction to a wealth narrative that treats 400 famous names as the top of the pyramid, when the much larger, much less visible population of car dealers, lawyers, and oil operators across the country actually holds far more of the money.
Related reading: Paths to Millions: How First-Generation Wealth Is Actually Built · The Accidental Millionaires: What TSP, 401(k), and Payroll-Deduction Wealth Actually Look Like · Anatomy of the Forbes 400: Who’s Actually On the List · Billionaire Rankings: How Extreme Wealth Is Counted · Multiple Streams of Income: The Myth, the Math, and What Wealthy Households Actually Do
