Matthew Lucky reviews The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, now out at Henry Holt and Co.
Princeton University professor Owen Zidar and University of Chicago professor Eric Zwick argue in their upcoming book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, that we have misunderstood the nature of wealth distribution in the United States. Residing just below the visible upper rank of billionaires, there is a neglected echelon of some three million “Main Street Millionaires,” composed largely of owners of successful private businesses. Zidar and Zwick also call these millionaires “the Stealthy Wealthy because they fly under the radar.” The story that emerges from bringing these Main Street Millionaires under examination is Janus-faced. In one sense, Zidar and Zwick present an optimistic narrative where the American dream is alive, as Main Street Millionaires are mostly individuals from non-affluent backgrounds who became successful through sustained hard work. The second division of the book, however, illustrates a portrait of crony capitalism as Main Street Millionaires leverage their wealth into political and market power.
To study Main Street Millionaires, Zidar and Zwick assembled a novel dataset with the help of the U.S. Treasury Department to link together the previously siloed tax data on businesses, owners, and employers. They write, “for the first time, we could fill out the full map of American enterprise—from small firms to the richest Americans—and see who owned what, how much they earned, where they lived, and how they built their fortunes.” In comparison, past methods for measuring the characteristics of affluent Americans, such as the Forbes 400 list or surveys of the wealthy, produced far more limited pictures.
When Zidar and Zwick dug into their data, they discovered that Main Street Millionaires are quite different from what one might expect from media coverage of coastal elite billionaires who made their fortunes in tech and finance. Main Street Millionaires are distributed across the U.S., running everyday businesses such as “the supermarket where you shop, the restaurant where you order a burger, and the convenience store where you buy gas, newspaper, and coffee.” Zidar and Zwick offer that there is a good chance you know one of these millionaires without realizing it, as they are a common feature throughout the economy. They note, for instance, that “many successful companies specialize in making niche inputs along a supply chain. Although they are largely invisible to the average consumer, such businesses play key roles in making the products we use every day,” and it is by building successful firms that serve these niches that many millionaires are made. To take just one example, Zidar and Zwick highlight John Paterakis, who built a firm worth $250 million that primarily supplies hamburger buns to McDonald’s. These firms are not on Silicon Valley’s cutting edge of emerging technologies. Instead, they fill basic roles in the economy that reward a dedicated few who diligently apply themselves and reinvest their profits into improving their businesses.
Zidar and Zwick estimate that 25% of Main Street Millionaires have inherited their firms/fortunes, which leaves a strong supermajority who succeeded by building something new. Likewise, while people from affluent families in the top 1% or 10% of income are disproportionately more likely to found companies, “70 percent [of Main Street Millionaires] come from families outside the top 10 percent.” These points taken together suggest the American dream is alive for upwardly mobile entrepreneurs.
Among successful entrepreneurs, Zidar and Zwick flag a set of predictive characteristics. They observe, “the chance that someone will start a business substantially rises if that person gets his first job in an industry that produces more entrepreneurs.…people gain specific skills and knowledge from these industries that make entrepreneurship more likely, and they develop valuable professional networks.” That is, human capital formation through relevant early work experiences, particularly in industries like “computer systems design, accounting, and building equipment contracting,” is critical. Zidar and Zwick demonstrate the value of Main Street Millionaires’ leadership by comparing companies in which one suffered the unexpected death of the owner. They found that, “in the four years after an owner’s death, firm profits per worker fell by an average of 82 percent compared to similar firms in which the owner was alive.”
The concluding third of The Everywhere Millionaire turns to consider the political power of Main Street Millionaires, and a portrait of crony capitalism emerges. Zidar and Zwick relate, “Main Street Millionaires don’t just compete; they conspire to write the rules of the game to protect their profits. Less competition means less innovation and higher prices, all to the detriment of consumers.” These millionaires exert considerable political influence in the U.S., and the result is that the laws that govern their firms are frequently rigged in their favor. For example, every U.S. state has enacted autofranchise laws to entrench auto dealerships (a large source of Main Street Millionaires). These laws prevent auto manufacturers from terminating contracts due to concerns of efficiency and profitability on the part of dealers and restrict the entry of competing dealers within the territory of incumbents.
The Main Street Millionaires have disproportionate resources for lobbying and political donations. Zidar and Zwick invite us to “consider who donates to members of Congress’s tax-writing committees.” As it turns out, “the top industries for campaign contributions mirror the top industries of Main Street Millionaires in general”: real estate, legal services, and medicine and health. They add here that “largely through the influence of these millionaires, lawmakers have built a two-track tax code that favors business owners over wage labor and gives them advantages at every point of taxation.” They sum up by quoting Mitchell Baldridge, cofounder of Better Bookkeeping, that “owning a small business is the best tax deal in America…earning business income opens up amazing opportunities for tax savings and wealth creation.” That deal was also authored by business owners for business owners.
Perhaps more interestingly, Main Street Millionaires frequently go beyond donating to politicians to become elected office holders themselves. Zidar and Zwick instruct that, “decamillionaires are more than ten times as likely to sit in Congress than their share of the population would suggest, while centimillionaires are sixty-two times as likely to hold congressional seats. These wealthy politicians are predominantly Main Street Millionaires.” This occurs because free and fair elections tend to elect candidates for office who are wealthier than their average constituents. When competing for office, the affluent have many advantages. They can self-fund campaigns, they often have wealthy networks to tap for additional donations, and business owners without fixed schedules have the temporal flexibility to campaign.
Additionally, Zidar and Zwick observe that the low salaries for many elected offices function as de facto property requirements for office. As they note, “a factory worker who earns $50,000 a year cannot afford to take a $30,000 job as a state legislator.” The resulting overrepresentation of Main Street Millionaires in elected office skews in favor of Republicans, as small business owners have a greater affinity for the GOP. A more troubling political effect of the political power of Main Street Millionaires, however, is that Zidar and Zwick recount many instances of millionaires in office authoring and passing legislation that directly enriches themselves. For instance, “no fewer than twenty-eight members of Congress… collectively obtained $27 million in these [PPP] loans” during Covid-19. In similar fashion, during the passage of the Trump administration’s 2025 tax bill, legislators created tax breaks for income-producing real estate holdings, which many of them owned.
The real money buying power
At the conclusion of The Everywhere Millionaire, we are left with a tension between two faces of wealth and business ownership in America. At first, we are instructed that these self-made millionaires are the vital sparks for American industry and their wealth is the reward for hard work. Yet, in the second instance, we also observe that they directly shape the laws that govern their industries to advantage themselves at the expense of the public, potential competitors, and other firms elsewhere in the supply chain. Zidar and Zwick recount, for instance, that auto dealers and beer distributors benefit from laws protecting them from both entry from competitors and discipline from manufacturers up the supply chain. Likewise, your local doctor’s income is enhanced in the U.S. by Congressional legislation limiting the supply of new physicians, and real estate agents benefit from a standard commission structure imposed by the National Association of Realtors. On balance, Zidar and Zwick present a much more optimistic narrative, as they devote far more attention in the book to the narratives of successful Main Street Millionaires living the American dream.
Zidar and Zwick’s findings regarding the political office-holding patterns of Main Street Millionaires raise a few considerations that I will center on to close. One point worth attention is Zidar and Zwick’s discussion on the relative political power of Main Street Millionaires versus billionaires. They advance one example from the 2025 tax bill, which “showed who’s really powerful among the wealthy, and who isn’t.” In this case, they observe, “[Elon Musk’s] power was vastly overstated in comparison to that of Main Street Millionaires,” as evidenced by the former losing out on electric vehicle credits while auto dealers in the latter secured tax breaks for themselves. As presented, the takeaway here is that billionaires are not as powerful as they appear in American politics, or as much as Democrats complain, because they can be overawed by the weight of millions of millionaires.
This insight that American politics is more polyarchy than oligarchy is valuable. Yet, I am skeptical about generalizing this observation as far as Zidar and Zwick are inclined to do. A critical factor here is how frequently the political preferences of billionaires and Main Street Millionaires conflict. Given that Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens report that, based on political donations of billionaires and surveys of millionaires, both populations are more economically conservative than the public, I suspect that they will be rowing in the same direction more often than not. Main Street Millionaires may hold the balance of power against billionaires, but if they are most often confederates in policy disputes, then the substantive effect of that insight is small. Perhaps we may do better to interpret the political power of Main Street Millionaires as a force multiplier for the billionaires, rather than a potential check.
A further wrinkle here is that, on first examination, governance by the affluent helps to explain Gilens’s findings in Affluence and Influence that the wealthy nearly always win against the many in policy-making when their preferences diverge. That is, it’s easy for the affluent to win policy fights when they literally are the policy-makers. In comparison, Andrew Taylor notes that the few blue-collar members of Congress and those from lower-income backgrounds lean more economically liberal; however, he contends that “party affiliation explains considerably more of the difference in members’ voting behavior than does variance in their personal attributes—and race, ethnicity, and gender explain more than wealth, occupation, and education.” Partisanship, after all, is hell of a drug. Perhaps, then, it doesn’t matter much that Congress overrepresents the affluent descriptively because voting patterns are largely conditioned by party affiliation?
I suspect, however, that this is not the best inference. For one, the aggregate measures of Congressional voting behavior may be too coarse to account for how business owners in Congress skew particular legislative items to favor themselves. Further, aggregate voting measures do not account for the agenda-setting power of affluent legislatures; that is, they cannot measure the votes that do not happen. Moreover, while party affiliation appears to overwhelm the role of class in explaining the voting patterns of members of Congress as it is currently constituted, it’s certainly plausible that more variation in voting along class lines would emerge in a legislature with a more heterogeneous composition. For instance, we might contemplate whether something like John McCormick’s proposal for a contemporary version of the Roman Tribunes, in the form of a lottocratic legislative body that excludes citizens in the top 10% of income and/or wealth from eligibility, would escape some of the current disciplining power of parties.
In the end, Zidar and Zwick’s narrative left me highly ambivalent. They reveal a portrait of American capitalism (mostly) working as advertised, as self-made Main Street Millionaires realize the American dream of individuals rising through merit and virtue, while on the reverse of the medal they illuminate a deep bramble of crony capitalism growing out of entrepreneurial successes. The prospects for continued dynamism in the American economy appear to hinge on the former trend outpacing the latter even as it also feeds it directly. In any event, Zidar and Zwick’s work is an insightful corrective to popular misconceptions regarding the nature, origin, and distribution of wealth in America that is worthy of attention, even if its implications for the American economy are indeterminate.
Listen to Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales talk with Eric Zwick about his and Owen Zidar’s new book on the most recent Capitalisn’t episode here.
Author’s Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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