Picture an American millionaire. You might see a disheveled tech founder preaching about the power of AI or a well-suited hedge fund manager. Maybe you picture a CEO in plush sweater watching the game from the owners box at a stadium named for the company they run.
While these are probably millionaires. They are certainly not the average American millionaire.
According to The Everywhere Millionaire, a new book by economists Owen Zidar (Princeton) and Eric Zwick (Chicago Booth), American millionaires are everywhere, running the car dealership on Route 19. The garage-door company with a dozen trucks. The hot dog stand that grew into a chain. The HVAC contractor whose vans you pass every morning.
Zidar and Zwick spent years inside Treasury and IRS data linking millions of private businesses to the people who own them. What they found should change how every business owner thinks about what they're building.
Meet the Everywhere Millionaires
Zwick defines an everywhere millionaire as someone with a net worth of at least $5 million, where an ownership stake in a private business is a big part of that wealth (Harvard Gazette). That’s about 3 million Americans. With an average wealth of around $25 million, together they hold more than 13 times the wealth of the entire Forbes 400, the magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans. (Next Big Idea Club).
The name says it all. Everywhere millionaires aren't clustered in Silicon Valley or Manhattan. They're in every county, solving ordinary problems for their neighbors. The typical everywhere millionaire is 62 and married. They're a bit more likely than the general population to have a college degree, but not by much (CBS News).
Everywhere millionaires prove that the path to real wealth in America doesn't run through unicorn valuations, fancy business schools, or the board rooms of publicly traded companies. It runs through everyday businesses that serve average American communities.
Built, Bought, oR Inherited
About 75% of everywhere millionaires made their fortunes by either building a business from scratch or buying an existing business. The authors estimate only about 25% of these owners inherited their firms or fortunes (ProMarket).
Buying an existing business gets far less attention than it deserves. About a third of everywhere millionaires purchased their business rather than founding it (Of Dollars and Data). An established business comes with customers, staff, vendors, and contracts, and any issues associated with them.
Clean Start™
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Building a business from scratch is often more risky, requiring grit, determination, and hustle. Dick Portillo is a great example. Dick grew up in a Chicago housing project. He never went to college, and he had never cooked a hot dog before he started selling them. In 1963, he spent $1,100 on a small trailer with no running water and started selling hot dogs outside Chicago. He grew it into Portillo's, and in 2014 he sold the chain for a reported price of nearly $1 billion (Restaurant Business).
Notably, the authors are clear that Portillo's story is striking but not exceptional. No credential, no coastal zip code, no venture capital. Just an ordinary product, served better than the place down the street.
The Honest Odds
Celebrating business owners doesn't mean pretending building a business is easy. Per the authors' data, only about 5% of founders reach everywhere millionaire status (owning a company worth more than $5 million) within ten years. About half of new businesses close or get folded into another company within five years (Of Dollars and Data).
But you don't need $5 million to be successful. About 10% of Americans who grew up in the bottom 20% of incomes and made it to the top 20% got there by owning a business. By comparison, only 1.3% of them got there by attending an elite college (Next Big Idea Club). The path pushed on most young people moved far fewer people up the ladder than the one we rarely mention.
The Business Has to Outlive You
What separates the owners who climb from the ones who stall usually isn't the idea. It's whether they built something that can survive pressure: a partner dispute, a lawsuit, a buyer's due diligence, or the owner's own absence.
Zidar and Zwick found that when a millionaire owner died unexpectedly, profits at their business typically fell by four-fifths over the next four years compared with similar businesses with continuous leadership (The Economist, via The Nightly). Many of these businesses either shrank or closed.
These businesses depend on one person. Value that lives only in the owner's head, handshake deals, and personal relationships is fragile. A business that lasts, and that someone else would pay for, has its foundation written down.
That foundation is legal infrastructure, and it starts on day one:
The right business structure. Whether you're an LLC or a corporation affects your taxes, who can invest, and how easily you can sell.
Ownership in writing. Who owns what, who decides what, and what happens if a partner leaves, dies, or wants out.
The company owns its assets. The brand, the code, the recipes, and the customer list belong to the business, not to whoever happened to create them.
Records a buyer can trust. Remember that a third of these firms were bought. Your exit is someone else's entry, and their due diligence will find every gap.
That's what Clean Start™ is built to do. It gets your t sets up your business structure, puts ownership in writing, and makes sure the business owns what it builds, so your business is due-diligence-ready and investor-ready from day one.
Build It to Last
The everywhere millionaires didn't win the lottery. They built or bought businesses that worked, and kept them standing. Start yours on a foundation that can carry the weight.
Find out where your business stands. Take our free checkup to see what's missing from your business's legal foundation, and what Clean Start would fix.
Next: The Moats
The book has a second half to this story. Established owners don't only compete. They also shape the rules of their industries: licensing requirements, permits, and laws that decide who gets to open the doors at all.
Next week we'll map those walls, industry by industry. We're also launching Moat Map, a tool that shows the licenses, permits, and regulatory hurdles standing between your idea and opening day.
Curtis Wadsworth, J.D., Ph.D. is the founder of Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services, an AI-native corporate and IP law firm serving founders, startups, SMBs, and growth-stage companies. Reach him at curt@nerdlawyer.ai.
This post is for general information. It is not legal advice or investment advice, and it is based on press reports of an unfiled draft prospectus.
© 2026 Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services. All rights reserved.
Sources
Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There (Henry Holt and Co.)
Prof G Markets: Meet the Millionaire Class That Really Runs America
This post is general information, not legal advice, and doesn't create an attorney-client relationship.
