NEW YORK — America’s wealthiest people are not always the household names dominating Forbes lists, Wall Street headlines or Silicon Valley coverage.
Some may be the dentist operating multiple clinics in a suburban community. Others own automobile dealerships, HVAC companies, restaurant chains, medical practices, construction firms or regional distributors.
And according to economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, there are millions of them.
Their new research, detailed in the book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, argues that America’s wealthy population is substantially broader—and more geographically dispersed—than conventional billionaire rankings suggest.
The researchers estimate that roughly 5 million U.S. households have at least $5 million in wealth, putting them in approximately the top 4% of American households by wealth based on 2022 data.
Within that group, they identify roughly 3 million private-business owners with average wealth of about $25 million.
Collectively, these so-called “Main Street Millionaires” represent an enormous pool of wealth that can be difficult to see in conventional rankings because their fortunes are tied to privately held companies rather than publicly traded stocks.
The millionaire you don’t see on television
The popular image of American wealth tends to revolve around technology founders, hedge-fund managers, celebrities and corporate CEOs.
Zidar and Zwick argue that picture is incomplete.
Their research focuses on people who built or inherited substantial private businesses and accumulated wealth without becoming nationally famous.
The examples include dentists who expand into networks of practices, car dealers, commercial contractors, restaurant operators and beverage distributors.
These business owners can become extremely wealthy while remaining almost invisible outside their communities.
They may own expensive homes, private aircraft or other luxury assets, but their primary source of wealth can remain the value of the business they operate.
That makes their fortunes much harder to capture through lists based primarily on publicly disclosed holdings.
Three million business owners, roughly $25 million each
One of the most striking numbers from the economists’ research is the estimated size of this private-business wealth class.
The researchers identify approximately 3 million private-business owners with an average net worth near $25 million. Their combined wealth is estimated at roughly $65 trillion in one presentation of the research, although other reporting has emphasized approximately $50 trillion depending on the population and methodology being discussed.
The important point is not the difference between those estimates.
It is the scale.
The private-business owners examined by Zidar and Zwick represent a vastly larger pool of wealth holders than the small group captured by the Forbes 400.
Their research says these Main Street millionaires collectively possess more than 13 times the wealth of the Forbes 400.
That does not mean each business owner is richer than a Forbes 400 member.
It means the private-business-owner population is dramatically larger.
Why these fortunes are so difficult to see
The answer lies partly in how American businesses are structured.
Many privately owned companies operate through pass-through business structures, including partnerships and S corporations.
Unlike traditional C corporations, income from these businesses can generally flow directly through to their owners for tax purposes rather than being taxed first at the corporate level and again when distributed as dividends.
Zidar and Zwick’s research traces the expansion of these business structures to changes in the U.S. tax system beginning decades ago, particularly after the 1986 tax reforms.
The researchers argue that the growth of pass-through businesses helped reshape the distribution of income among America’s highest earners.
Apollo’s analysis of the book’s findings says that 5.8 percentage points of the 10.5-percentage-point increase in the top 1%’s income share since 1985 came through pass-through businesses, according to the authors’ calculations.
That finding shifts the conversation about inequality away from only publicly traded corporations and toward privately held businesses.
The American rich are not concentrated only in New York and Silicon Valley
Geography is another major part of the story.
America’s most famous billionaires tend to be associated with places such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami.
But the Main Street millionaire population is much more dispersed.
Zidar and Zwick say these wealthy business owners are found in hundreds of communities across the United States, often in midsize metropolitan areas rather than the country’s traditional financial centers.
That means the wealthiest person in a community may not be a technology founder or investment banker.
It could be the person whose family owns a dealership group.
Or the dentist whose practice became a regional chain.
Or the contractor whose company has trucks operating across an entire state.
Or the restaurant owner whose local operation expanded into dozens of locations.
The story of Dick Portillo
One of the book’s best-known examples is Dick Portillo, the entrepreneur behind the Portillo’s restaurant empire.
Portillo started a hot-dog stand in the Chicago area in 1963. Over decades, he expanded the business before eventually selling it for approximately $1 billion.
His story illustrates the type of wealth the economists are attempting to measure.
Portillo was not a Wall Street financier or Silicon Valley software founder.
He built wealth by expanding a consumer business over decades.
Other examples discussed by the researchers include entrepreneurs who built fortunes in industries ranging from tanning-bed distribution to medical and professional services.
The common thread is business ownership.
America has more millionaires—but the definition of “rich” is changing
The findings arrive alongside separate research showing just how quickly America’s millionaire population has expanded.
According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, the United States had approximately 23.6 million U.S.-dollar millionaires in 2025—more than 40% of the global total.
The U.S. added more than 441,000 millionaires during 2025, accounting for almost half of the increase worldwide.
That figure uses a broader definition of millionaire than Zidar and Zwick’s “Main Street Millionaire” category.
UBS measures individuals with at least $1 million in net wealth, while Zidar and Zwick’s core definition of “rich” begins at $5 million in household wealth and focuses specifically on private-business ownership for their Main Street analysis.
The distinction is important.
It prevents two very different wealth measurements from being treated as though they describe the same population.
Even $1 million doesn’t necessarily feel rich anymore
The expanding number of wealthy households is also changing how Americans perceive the word “millionaire.”
CBS News reported that the U.S. added 736,000 new millionaires in 2025, according to Capgemini’s World Wealth Report 2026, bringing its measure of the American millionaire population to 8.7 million individuals.
That number is considerably lower than UBS’s 23.6 million because the two organizations use different definitions and methodologies.
Capgemini’s high-net-worth measure counts investable assets and excludes a primary residence and certain other assets.
UBS uses net wealth, including financial and real assets.
The numbers therefore should not be directly combined—but together they show the same broader phenomenon: the population of Americans with substantial wealth is enormous and growing.
The stock market is only part of the story
Financial markets have played a major role in creating new millionaires.
UBS reported that global personal wealth rose 10.8% in 2025, with the United States accounting for nearly half of the world’s newly created dollar millionaires.
But the research from Zidar and Zwick points toward another engine of wealth creation: owning a successful private company.
A business owner can accumulate wealth through years of retained profits, business appreciation and eventual sale of the company.
That creates a very different path to wealth than simply receiving a high salary.
And because the underlying companies are private, their value often remains invisible to the public until a sale, acquisition or financial disclosure brings it to light.
The wealth gap is not only about billionaires
The research also changes the way economists and policymakers can think about inequality.
Public discussion frequently focuses on billionaires such as technology founders and investors because their fortunes are relatively easy to estimate.
But the economists argue that the broader population of multimillionaire business owners is far larger and collectively controls much more wealth.
The Princeton University summary of the book describes these people as a “Hidden 1%” and says their wealth can give them influence in local, state and federal policy debates.
That influence can occur without the visibility associated with America’s richest billionaires.
A local business owner can be a major employer, donor, civic figure and political participant while remaining almost unknown outside the region.
A political dimension emerges
The research also examines the relationship between wealth and political power.
Fortune reported that Zidar and Zwick estimate pass-through business owners make up a significant share of elected officials at both the federal and state levels.
The researchers argue that this creates an important feedback loop:
business ownership creates wealth → wealth creates political influence → policy can affect the economics of business ownership.
That does not mean every wealthy business owner uses political influence in the same way.
But it does raise questions about how tax rules, regulations and industry protections shape the distribution of wealth.
The researchers’ work therefore goes beyond simply counting millionaires.
It asks how America’s tax system and political institutions interact with the people who own private businesses.
The tax code is central to the debate
Pass-through taxation is one of the most important issues in the book.
The structure was originally intended to prevent certain businesses from being subjected to multiple layers of taxation.
But as pass-through businesses grew in number and scale, the same structures became increasingly important to wealthy business owners.
The researchers argue that this helped channel a growing share of national income toward business owners.
The debate became even more significant after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which created the Section 199A deduction for qualifying pass-through business income.
Fortune reported that the economists have highlighted the persistence of that deduction as an important factor in the current wealth landscape.
There are two very different stories about the American Dream
The research produces a complicated picture of economic opportunity.
On one hand, the stories of Main Street millionaires demonstrate that enormous fortunes can be built outside Silicon Valley, Wall Street and inherited dynasties.
A person can start a modest company and, over decades, build an enterprise worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, the researchers’ findings show how the tax and business structures surrounding private companies can amplify wealth accumulation.
That means the American wealth story cannot be reduced to either “hard work creates wealth” or “wealth is inherited.”
For many private-business owners, the reality is more complicated.
Entrepreneurship, capital, tax structures, market power, family wealth and decades of compounding can all interact.
The billionaire list may be missing the bigger story
The Forbes 400 remains a useful measure of the country’s most visible fortunes.
But it captures only a tiny fraction of America’s wealthy population.
For 2026, Forbes reported that it takes approximately $4.4 billion to make the Forbes 400—the highest entry threshold in the list’s history.
The 400 members collectively hold roughly $8 trillion.
Against that backdrop, Zidar and Zwick’s research offers a different perspective.
The headline billionaires may be the most recognizable rich Americans.
But the much larger population of private-business owners may be where a substantial portion of America’s less-visible wealth actually sits.
The new picture of American wealth
The most striking implication of the research is not simply that America has millions of wealthy people.
It is that wealth can be hiding in ordinary places.
The person running the dealership down the road.
The dentist with six offices.
The contractor whose company employs hundreds.
The restaurant owner expanding into another state.
These people may never appear on a billionaire list, but their businesses can make them extraordinarily wealthy.
That is why Zidar and Zwick call them “Everywhere Millionaires.”
And as America’s wealth continues to grow, the country’s financial map may look increasingly different from the one presented by the familiar names at the top of Forbes.
The biggest fortunes in America may not always be the ones everyone knows.
Some of the country’s richest people could be the ones you pass every day—and never realize are multimillionaires.
