Everywhere Millionaires

Everywhere Millionaires is Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick’s term for wealthy households whose fortunes come from closely held, geographically dispersed businesses rather than the public-company equity associated with celebrity billionaires. Auto dealers, dentists with regional practices, contractors, restaurateurs, and other owner-managers are the central examples. The category directs attention to private-business ownership and to the state and local institutions that govern it. ¹

The economic foundation

The underlying population is visible in tax data because S-corporations and partnerships pass income through to their owners instead of paying corporate income tax at the entity level. That organizational form is not evidence that a firm is fictitious or small. In 2014, 69% of the top 1% of income earners and 84% of the top 0.1% received some pass-through income. Kopczuk and Zwick’s review describes the typical top earner as a doctor, lawyer, or owner-operator of a middle-sized business rather than a public-company executive. ²

Smith, Yagan, Zidar, and Zwick linked 11 million firms to their owners for 2001–2014. Top pass-through profits accrued mainly to working-age owners of closely held mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Profits fell 82% after a premature owner’s death and 71% after owner retirement; the authors summarize the combined result as a three-quarters decline. Treating that share of pass-through profit as a return to owner human capital reverses the picture obtained from wages alone: most top earners derive more income from human capital than from financial capital. ³

This complicates a pure rentier interpretation. Owner-specific labor, networks, reputation, and other inalienable inputs help generate the income, even though tax returns call it business profit. The same evidence does not establish that every return is socially productive: the authors’ definition of human capital also includes rent-extraction ability, and Kopczuk and Zwick explicitly separate private returns from social returns. ⁴⁵

What the wealth totals do and do not show

In November 2026, Zidar and Zwick estimated the Forbes list at about $8 trillion, or 4.3% of household wealth, against more than $63 trillion, or 38%, for Everywhere Millionaires. The post attributes the latter calculation to the Survey of Consumer Finances but supplies neither a wealth cutoff nor enough method to identify the included households. ⁶

The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts provide a useful comparison, not a validation of that exact claim. Their Next 9% group—households between the 90th and 99th wealth percentiles—held $67.634 trillion, or 36.4% of household net worth, in 2026:Q2. That group is not coextensive with private-business-owning Everywhere Millionaires. Matching an aggregate for an entire percentile band to a book category requires an explicit crosswalk; without one, the similar totals cannot settle the category’s size. ⁷

Private-business valuation adds another layer of uncertainty. Smith, Zidar, and Zwick’s wealth estimates capitalize observed income while allowing returns to vary by industry and adjusting for owner human capital. Uniform capitalization assumptions can produce materially different totals because a dollar of profit does not imply the same transferable asset value in every firm. Their working definition of wealth also excludes human capital, Social Security, consumer durables, and nonprofits. ⁸

Political power and rent seeking

Zidar and Zwick argue that geographically dispersed owners exercise power in city halls, statehouses, and Congress, often to protect their businesses. Their proposed mechanism is institutional: car dealers and similar owners are present in many districts, while much of the relevant regulation is made by states and localities. They label the stronger claim that conventional discussion overstates billionaire political power as speculative; the wealth totals alone do not identify political influence. ⁹¹⁰

A rent-seeking reading therefore needs evidence beyond ownership and wealth. Franchise restrictions, occupational rules, tax preferences, and other identifiable policies can show owners obtaining protection, but the research on human capital warns against treating all pass-through profit as rents. The useful distinction is between income tied to an owner’s productive contribution and income preserved by a rule that excludes competitors or shifts costs to others.

Related concepts

• theory-of-the-firm — the ownership and organizational-form layer: where a firm draws its boundary affects how income appears in tax data, while Coase’s transaction-cost margin explains a different dimension of firm structure.
• competitive-rent-extraction — a mechanism-level account of rents persisting under apparent competition; the Everywhere Millionaire frame adds dispersed political representation but does not itself prove extraction.
• lifecycle-wealth-accumulation — a separate decomposition problem: age and compounding can produce steep wealth profiles, just as organizational form and capitalization assumptions can change apparent top wealth.
• knowledge-problem — dispersed owners possess local knowledge and face local rules, giving a concrete economic setting for Hayek’s argument about knowledge that no central observer holds in full.

Sources

• Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick 2026 — Krugman is the GOAT. But even GOATs have blind spots.
• 2026 — The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There
• Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick 2019 — Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century
• 2023 — Top Wealth in America: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich
• Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick 2020 — Business Incomes at the Top
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2026 — Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 — DFA Table (net worth by wealth percentile group)

Footnotes

1. 2026 — The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There ↩

2. Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick 2020 — Business Incomes at the Top ↩

3. Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick 2019 — Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century ↩

4. Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick 2019 — Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century ↩

5. Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick 2020 — Business Incomes at the Top ↩

6. Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick 2026 — Krugman is the GOAT. But even GOATs have blind spots. ↩

7. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2026 — Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 — DFA Table (net worth by wealth percentile group) ↩

8. 2023 — Top Wealth in America: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich ↩

9. Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick 2026 — Krugman is the GOAT. But even GOATs have blind spots. ↩

10. 2026 — The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There ↩