‘These are the real rich in America.’
The reaction of many economists and journalists to the new book by Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar has been darkly comic. When these professional students of society discover that the wealthy are often engaged in activities considered unglamorous by coastal elites — building a hot dog empire, presiding over a fleet of car dealerships, or manufacturing and installing gutters — their reaction seems to be something like, “Hey, everyone, check out this new book; millionaires aren’t who you think they are!” Well, no, professor — millionaires aren’t who you think they are.
In a recent Wall Street Journal essay adapted from their book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, Zwick and Zidar tell the story of Dick Portillo:
Dick Portillo opened a hot-dog stand in 1963 without knowing how to cook a hot dog. Half a century later he sold the company for $1 billion. The proceeds bought a Chicago-area mansion, a private jet and a 12,000-square-foot waterfront home in Naples, Fla., with its own dock to moor his 130-foot yacht, Top Dog.
“I came from a poor family and at one time thought I didn’t have anything to offer the world,” Portillo wrote in a memoir. The youngest of three children, he was born in Chicago to immigrants from Mexico and Greece and raised partly in one of the city’s most notorious housing projects.
By 2014, the stand he’d built with $1,100 had become the Midwest’s largest privately owned restaurant company with 4,000 employees and no franchises or outside investors.
They continue:
Stories like Portillo’s rarely make the news. His business was private. He sold hot dogs, not some shiny new technology. His success grew slowly over decades and in the upper Midwest away from the coasts.
But Portillo’s story is hardly unique. Across America, such business owners—we call them Everywhere Millionaires—have built extraordinary fortunes running ordinary businesses. Some launched their own ventures, working long hours and reinvesting the profits to stay afloat and grow. Others inherited a family firm and built upon the success of prior generations.
Pop culture portrays the rich as an elite few, akin to the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the Gilded Age. But rich private business owners are now so plentiful that we’re living in America’s first Age of Millionaires.
The Age of Millionaires.
Zwick and Zidar are excellent economists, and this book is deeply informed by their research. Analyzing government data, they conclude that there are 3 million “everywhere millionaires,” collectively worth $65 trillion. “Far more than a few high-profile billionaires on the coasts,” the economists conclude, “these are the real rich in America.”
Millionaires *are* who you think they are (if you are not a coastal elite)https://t.co/NKLv80qRfp
— Michael R. Strain (@MichaelRStrain) September 27, 2026
Check out their book to learn the stories of “the real rich in America.” And to receive a validation of the intuitions of American-heartland common sense. Two more examples:
You don’t need to be a genius to be a successful entrepreneur. The relationship between starting a star business and SAT scores is, in fact, quite weak. The top 10% of test scorers become founders of businesses only 1.3 times as often as those at the median. What matters more is real experience in the working world or early exposure to a family business.
Portillo, for example, didn’t go to college. He enlisted in the Marine Corps seven days after graduating high school in 1957, and he considers his two years at Camp Pendleton among the most important of his life. They taught him teamwork, organizational planning and a deep appreciation for proper training, all of which he later used in building his business.
And:
The typical star founder is not a rich kid. Most come from poor or middle-class families, simply because there are 99 times as many people in the bottom 99% as in the top 1%. Among star founders, there are 2.5 times as many from poor backgrounds as from the top 1%. Only about a quarter of business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies.
The title of their Wall Street Journal piece is “The American Dream Is Alive. And It’s Minting Millionaires.” As it happens, I wrote a Saturday Essay in the Journal a few years ago with a similar title: “The American Dream Is Alive and Well.” I tallied up the evidence: Despite the consensus to the contrary among academic economists, the media, and politicians, the wages of typical workers had not been stagnant for decades, the middle of the labor market had not been permanently hollowed out, the gains from economic growth had not excluded the bottom 99 percent, and America was still characterized by broad upward mobility.
The public debate would be better if it were more optimistic about the state of the American dream. Optimism is the empirically supported position. Zidar and Zwick’s book adds to that empirical support — and humanizes it.