Three Million Business Owners Hold America's Densest Wealth

Economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, authors of The Everywhere Millionaire, told Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast that roughly three million private business owners — beverage distributors, dentists and car wash operators among them — hold one of the most concentrated pools of wealth in the United States.

The popular picture of American wealth is a tech founder with a ticker symbol attached to his net worth. The research Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick brought to Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast points somewhere much duller and much larger: roughly three million owners of private businesses who, taken together, hold one of the most concentrated pools of wealth in the country.

The two economists, authors of The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, told hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal that the archetypes are beverage distributors, dentists and car wash owners — businesses that are regional, unglamorous, and in most cases invisible to the public markets. Zidar and Zwick call them millionaires hiding in plain sight.

Why a beer distributor is a better wealth story than a startup

The reason these businesses recur in the data is structural rather than sentimental. A beverage distributor typically sits inside a legally protected three-tier alcohol system that limits who may sell to whom in a given territory. A dental practice holds a licensed franchise on a service with steady demand and limited price competition. A car wash owns real estate on a corner with traffic. None of them is a growth story. All of them are hard to displace.

Those are the characteristics that produce durable owner income rather than a single liquidity event. And unlike a listed company, a private firm's value is not marked to market every trading day. That is precisely why this wealth has been easy to miss: there is no ticker, no quarterly print, no index inclusion. The owner's balance sheet is one illiquid position, usually concentrated in a single asset, often in a single ZIP code.

The measurement problem the public market does not have

Public equity wealth is trivially countable. As of the last trade at 17:23 GMT on Friday, 18 September 2026, the S&P 500 tracker SPY stood at $759.49, down 0.41% on the day from a prior close of $762.60; the Nasdaq 100 fund QQQ was at $717.20, up 0.04%; and the Dow tracker DIA sat at $515.01, down 0.64%. Anyone holding those funds can price their stake to the cent, instantly, on a screen.

Nothing comparable exists for the three million owners in the Zidar and Zwick study. Their wealth surfaces in tax data as business income and in estate records at transfer, but not in a daily quote. That asymmetry has consequences well beyond bookkeeping. Wealth that is continuously priced gets debated continuously — in market commentary, in inequality research, in policy. Wealth that is only priced when a business changes hands tends to be discussed at the moment of sale, if at all.

It also changes how the owners themselves behave. A public-market investor can rebalance a concentrated position in an afternoon. A distributor whose net worth is the distributorship cannot sell 10% of it before lunch. The result is a class of household with substantial paper wealth, very little liquidity, and an unusually direct exposure to one local economy.

Who is actually affected by getting this wrong

Several groups have a real stake in whether this wealth is measured properly.

Policymakers. Pass-through entities — partnerships, S corporations and sole proprietorships, where profits are taxed on the owner's personal return rather than at the corporate level — are the legal wrapper for most of these firms. Tax debates framed around corporate rates or public-market capital gains simply do not land on them the same way.
Private-market buyers. Search funds, independent sponsors and lower-middle-market private equity have spent years marketing exactly this thesis: buy the unsexy regional operator from a retiring owner. The Zidar and Zwick framing is, in effect, the academic version of that pitch deck.
Banks and insurers. Succession, buy-sell agreements and key-man coverage are the products that sit on top of illiquid owner wealth. The size of the pool determines the size of that market.
Workers in those businesses. When ownership transfers, the terms of the transfer — family succession, employee ownership, a financial buyer — decide what happens to pay and headcount in towns where the distributor or the dental group is a meaningful employer.

A blind spot with a demographic clock on it

The awkward part of the story is timing. Owners age. The businesses in this cohort are, by the nature of how they were built, held by people who spent decades accumulating a single position. Every one of those positions eventually gets sold, gifted, wound down or handed to a child. That is when illiquid private wealth becomes cash, debt or a new capital structure — and when it becomes visible.

The three-million figure matters because it sets the scale of that pipeline. It is not a niche. It is a population large enough that how those transfers are financed and taxed is a macroeconomic question rather than a family one. The full conversation with Alloway and Weisenthal is available from Bloomberg Markets.

What to watch from here

The useful test of the Zidar and Zwick argument is whether the plumbing catches up with it. Three things are worth tracking.

First, whether Internal Revenue Service and Treasury statistics on pass-through income get cited as routinely in wealth discussions as market indices are. Right now the daily move in SPY generates more commentary than an entire category of business ownership.

Second, whether the flow of capital into small-business acquisition keeps building. The more institutional money chases regional operators, the more these assets acquire something resembling a market price — and the less they hide in plain sight.

Third, whether tax policy starts distinguishing between wealth that can be liquidated and wealth that cannot. That distinction is the single sharpest line between a diversified index holder and a dentist whose net worth is a practice, a building and a patient list.

None of this displaces the public markets as the visible face of American capital. But it does suggest the visible face has never been the whole one. The people who got rich selling beer by the truckload, cleaning cars and filling cavities were never in the index — and that, on the evidence Zidar and Zwick present, is exactly why the count kept missing them.

Key facts

Main Street millionaires: About three million private business owners, per Zidar and Zwick
Researchers: Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, authors of The Everywhere Millionaire
Businesses cited: Beverage distributors, dentists, car wash owners
S&P 500 tracker (NYSEARCA: SPY): $759.49, -0.41%, as of 17:23 GMT Sept 18, 2026

Frequently asked questions

How many Americans are in the "Main Street millionaire" group?

Economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick put the number at roughly three million private business owners. Their research, presented on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, argues this group has amassed one of the most concentrated pools of wealth in the United States — larger and less visible than the public-market fortunes that dominate coverage of American wealth.

What kinds of businesses do these owners run?

The examples Zidar and Zwick cite are deliberately unglamorous: beverage distributors, dentists and car wash owners. These are regional, service- or distribution-based firms with steady demand and limited competition in their territories, rather than high-growth startups. Most are privately held and never appear on a stock exchange.

Who are Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick?

They are economists and the authors of The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. Their study of private business ownership and wealth concentration was the subject of an episode of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast hosted by Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal, published on 18 September 2026.

Why is this wealth described as "hiding in plain sight"?

Private businesses are not priced daily the way listed shares are. A stake in a distributorship or a dental practice shows up in tax filings as business income and in records when it is sold or inherited, but it has no ticker and no quarterly market value. That makes it easy to omit from popular accounts of who is wealthy.

What is a pass-through business?

A pass-through is a partnership, S corporation or sole proprietorship whose profits are taxed on the owner's personal return rather than at the corporate level. Most small and mid-sized private American businesses use this structure, which is why tax debates framed around corporate rates often do not reach the owners described in the study.

How did the broad US market trade when the episode was published?

As of the last trade at 17:23 GMT on 18 September 2026, the S&P 500 tracker SPY was at $759.49, down 0.41% from its prior close of $762.60. The Nasdaq 100 fund QQQ was at $717.20, up 0.04%, and the Dow tracker DIA was at $515.01, down 0.64%.

Sources

Odd Lots: How Beer Distributors and Other “Little Guys” Got Rich — Bloomberg Markets