At the Money: The Data Behind America’s Wealthy with Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick (September 30, 2026)
In this episode of ‘At the Money,’ I speak with Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick about the data behind America’s wealthiest people. About this week’s guests: Owen Zidar is professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, and Eric Zwick is professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Their new book is “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.”
Full transcript below. Part 1 is here.
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A dozen data points from the book:
1. The 1-to-1,000 Ratio (Public CEOs vs. Private Owners) For every single CEO of a large, publicly traded company in America, there are more than 1,000 private business owners with at least $25 million in net worth.
2. Main Street Wealth Swamps the Forbes 400: The Forbes 400 list receives 50% of all news coverage on wealth, its members hold only about 3% of total US household wealth. “Main Street Millionaires” hold more than 13 times the wealth of the Forbes 400—accounting for roughly 40% of all household wealth in the United States.
3. Nearly 5 Million Households Have Over $5 Million; they are the top 4%
2 million decamillionaires ($10M+) and
65,000 centimillionaires ($100M+).
4. Wealth Drives Business Ownership Rates Equity in a business is dominant vehicle for extreme wealth.
5. Half of Americans worth $5 million own a private business; at $10 million, that figure climbs to three-quarters; and above $100 million, virtually everyone owns a private business.
6. Private Owners Out-Earn Public C-Suite Executives 15-to-1 2022, America’s 9,000 top public company C-suite executives earned a collective $38 billion. By contrast, the top 1% of private business owners (a group 10 times as large) earned $570 billion—private owners collectively earned 15X times as much. Individually, average private owner in the top 1% earned 1.5 times as much as the average public CEO.
6B. 70 Cents of Every Pass-Through Dollar Goes to the Top 1% Tax Reform Act of 1986: 95% of all U.S. businesses reorged into pass-through structures (S-corps, LLCs, partnerships) to avoid double taxation.
7. Today, 70 cents of every $1 in pass-through business profits flows directly to households in the top 1% of income.
8. $200 Billion Transferred Tax-Free Every Year $30 million per married couple 2025 and sophisticated estate-planning tools, only 0.1% of all U.S. estates pay any federal estate tax. Americans pass on $200B annually tax-free.
9. The $100 Million Age (20 to 60): Accumulating top-tier wealth takes long horizons of reinvestment.
10. To reach the top 0.1% in wealth for your age group, a person needs:
in their 20s $9.6 million
in their 40s, $41.8 million;
in their 60s, $112.4 million—almost 6 times as much as someone in their 30s.
11. The $300 Billion Noncompete Penalty Over 20% of American workers are subject to noncompete agreements, which restrict employees from switching to local competitors or starting their own firms. Banning noncompete agreements nationwide would boost comp by $300B annually.
12. Overrepresentation of Wealth in Congress: Decamillionaires are 10X + as likely to sit in Congress as general population; centimillionaires are 62X as likely. Between 25% and 50% of federal lawmakers are private business owners or practice-owning professionals, giving biz interests significant sway over tax and regulatory policy
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TRANSCRIPT:
AT THE MONEY: The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America
Barry Ritholtz with Owen Zidar (Princeton) and Eric Zwick (University of Chicago)
Bloomberg Audio · Part Two
BARRY RITHOLTZ: America is a rich nation. But I want to get granular as to exactly how rich, who is rich, and how they got that way. The data is astounding. To help us unpack all of this and what it might mean for your personal prosperity, let’s bring in Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. They’re professors at Princeton and the University of Chicago, respectively, and they are the authors of a fascinating new book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.
And if you’re listening to this, be sure and check out part one, where we discuss a lot of the findings in the book. Today I really want to talk about the data, which really is very mind-blowing. Let’s start out with the thousand-to-one ratio, private owners versus public CEOs. For every wealthy CEO, there are more than a thousand private business owners worth at least $25 million in net worth. That blew my mind. Tell me a little bit about that.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: Yeah, so it’s a great statistic. It started out when we were thinking about the pass-through income and the growth of pass-throughs. Let’s add up all the income for top 1% pass-through business owners. And what’s a good reference for that, to make the point that this is a huge, surprisingly huge group? Well, let’s look at CEOs in the executive comp data set, which is roughly the S&P 1500, and it takes the CEOs, the CFOs, and adds up their salary plus the market values of their options.
And you say, okay, add that up. And it turns out they’re just swamped in size by the pass-through income flows for the pass-through business owners, because there are just way more of them, and they’re all across the industry, all across the country. You know, we’re talking about 1,500 CEOs plus another thousand CFOs or top execs, and we’re talking about over a million of these top 1 to 0.5% business owners.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: A million and a half people worth $25 million or more who are not running public companies. It’s amazing. Let’s talk about something even more finite: the Forbes 400. You guys explain how much Main Street swamps the Forbes 400. The Forbes 400 list receives 50% of all news coverage on wealth; its members hold only 3% of total US household wealth.
Meanwhile, Main Street millionaires are worth 13 times more than the total combined wealth of the Forbes 400, accounting for 40% of all household wealth. That data is just mind-blowing, especially how lopsided the media coverage is on the billionaires in the Forbes 400.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: To us, that’s one of the main points of the book. When you think about, you know, how to get rich or the influence of the rich in America, there’s just such a monopoly on attention on a very small handful of people, and we want to broaden the aperture to say, look, there’s a lot of money in America. It’s a very rich place with a lot of opportunity, and it’s not just the Forbes 400. We need to broaden it when we’re thinking about opportunity, tax policy, and, you know, just a huge range of issues that people care about. And we really think the narrative needs to be reset.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I want to really get granular with the data and just reveal how far off the narrative is. 5 million households have over $5 million. That’s the top 4%. And if you’ve followed the Fidelity 401(k) millionaire data, that really shouldn’t be a terrible surprise.
But then there are 2 million Americans worth $10 million or more. And then the number that I think could be the most shocking number in the entire book: if you ask people how many people are worth a hundred million or more in America, I don’t know, they’d say a few hundred, a few thousand. 65,000 Americans are centimillionaires, worth more than a hundred million dollars. I think that was the most shocking number in the entire book.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: It’s a huge group of people. So the 400 is 400 people. If you add all the people in their families, their kids, maybe it’s 1,500 people or 2,000 people — not 65,000. Right? So we’re talking about 30 to, you know, 50 times the number of people here.
That’s why not only are there a lot of $3 or $4 million houses, but there are a lot of $10, $20 million houses. That’s why in Aspen the average house price is so high. It’s not just some tech people from Silicon Valley buying those houses. It’s car dealers and people running manufacturing businesses making inputs into production for construction and so on.
And they’ve accumulated really screw-you money, and it’s amazing.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Yeah, I always say if you want to feel really bad about yourself, go to Zillow, set it to sold houses, and look at a wealthy part of America, out in the Hamptons. It’s genuinely shocking how many $30, $40, $50 million houses — hundreds — transact every summer. It blows my mind. Here’s another data point that I’m kind of starting to intuit, having plowed through the book: half of Americans worth $5 million or more own a private business.
That really seems to be the data point that is the core theme here: if you want to accumulate that sort of wealth, or you want to understand where that wealth is in America, you have to look at business owners.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: That’s absolutely right. One of the things that really jumped out to us when we were looking at pass-through businesses is that 70 cents of every dollar of income of these entities went to the top 1%. So this is really much more concentrated than public equity ownership and other forms of wealth, and it’s just very prevalent as you go further and further up into the wealth distribution.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: And again, more confirmation bias for me. I’m fond of saying the only reason any family should ever pay estate tax is if, on the way to your attorney to sign the documents, you’re hit by a bus. And you guys confirm that, because $200 billion transfers tax-free every year. Only 0.1% of all US estates pay any estate tax. That’s down — I did an analysis on that 15 years ago, and I want to say it was 0.4%, so it’s even less today.
Tell us a little bit about hundreds of billions of dollars transferring tax-free every year.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: And it’s quite striking. I mean, one of the reasons why I think it’s fallen is that the threshold has moved from $1.2 million in the early 2000s up to $30 million for married couples, and so we’ve really decimated it. There’s also a huge range of avoidance schemes. I think Gary Cohn, who was the NEC director in the first Trump administration, said only morons pay the estate tax.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s true. So it’s really amazing. Go on.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: Yeah, so I think, you know, this is one area where, if you look at what happened to the estate tax, a lot of it was basically sold on, “Oh, we need to help the little guy.” And there were some really wealthy business owners who were kind of using that to decimate it. And given how much wealth is transferring with the great wealth transfer, I think it’s high time to revisit the estate and inheritance tax regime, because it’s really amazing how little we collect in estate taxes.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: I want to talk about something that’s sort of contra to the main theme. You discuss some issues that can address some of that K shape we talked about, some of the inequalities that are there. I knew that there was a labor penalty for all these non-competes that are out there. I had no idea it was $300 billion annually.
Some states allow it; some states, like California, do not. If we were to get rid of all these non-competes — and I’m not talking about where there are very specific trade secrets, just run-of-the-mill non-competes for people who are just doing their daily jobs and are not senior and have no access to that — $300 billion a year. We’d go a long way to closing that K a little bit. Tell us about why we should get rid of all these non-competes.
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: So we try and place, you know, these Everywhere Millionaires and the businesses they run in this broader conversation about what’s going on with the labor share — what’s going on with the share of overall economic activity that’s going to workers versus owners — and suggest that some of the same factors that I think have gotten a lot more attention, which is, you know, workers having fewer options in terms of where to go if they’re not being treated well at a given employer… That’s, I think, a story that’s been told for large public companies maybe, but not so much for these smaller companies. And it turns out that non-competes are really broad and have expanded.
You see a Jimmy John’s or a Jersey Mike’s applying non-competes to the sandwich artists, and, you know, there is a lot of artistry in making a hoagie, and I have a taste for one as lunch approaches, but you shouldn’t be restricted from leaving one Jimmy John’s to go across the street to make sandwiches for somebody else. And if you scale that up, you know, the ability to walk out the door as a worker is a lot of power to get better wages as the company’s doing well. And these things have really proliferated in a way that seems kind of unhelpful for the conversation on inequality, and unnecessary, I think, when we think about, you know, protecting the secret to making that perfect sandwich.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Last question, which I guess indirectly relates to that. When you guys looked at wealth to see how overrepresented wealthy congressmen are versus the general public, the numbers are kind of shocking. So the decamillionaires, people worth $10 million, are 10x as likely — 10 times as likely — to sit in Congress as they’re found in the general population. But where this is really egregious is with the group of people worth a hundred million or more, the centimillionaires: you’re 62 times more likely to sit in Congress than you are to be found in the general population.
Tell us how that came about, and what does that mean for policy and income and wealth inequality?
OWEN ZIDAR & ERIC ZWICK: Yeah, it’s really quite striking. If you go to the grocery store, one out of every 33 people you meet is a private business owner. If you go to Congress, it’s one out of four. And I think some of that is because of the role of wealth and how hard it is to raise money.
And so if you think about who is the senator, or who’s playing golf with the senator, you know, it’s a lot of these folks. And the consequences are really quite striking in terms of thinking about who represents us when you’re making decisions about the deficit or debt, and, you know, some of these large tax bills that come through. I think that’s one part of the story for why we’ve seen such growth in their wealth: there are a lot of small loopholes that have kind of avalanched over time in recent decades, as a consequence of being so well represented, both in terms of people and in terms of their interests.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: To wrap up: if you are interested in either understanding wealth in America or becoming wealthy in America, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick is the book for you. I found it fascinating, and I think you will also. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Bloomberg’s At The Money.
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