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Inside the Lives of the Main Street Millionaires
What wealth looks like for business owners in the top 1 percent.
- By
- September 15, 2026
- CBR - Economics
What does it take to be among the richest Americans? In 2022, you would have needed $60 million to be among the top 0.1 percent in wealth. If you wanted to be in the top 0.1 percent in income, you would have needed to earn $2.3 million that year, making your wage effectively $1,140 an hour before taxes. Imagine being that rich. How might you spend your money?
To start, you’d send lots of it to Uncle Sam. Taxpayers who earn more than $1 million a year have an average federal income tax rate of around 25 percent and an average state income tax rate of another 5 percent (although some millionaires, especially private business owners, pay much less by putting their money in tax shelters and taking lots of other tax breaks). At a combined 30 percent federal-state income tax rate, $3 million in income shrinks to $2.1 million.
Let’s say your primary residence was worth $3.5 million. After a 20 percent down payment and with a 5 percent interest rate, you’d have a monthly mortgage payment of around $14,000. Property taxes would add another $3,000–$6,000 each month, depending on where you live. After accounting for utilities, maintenance, and insurance, you’d probably have a total monthly bill of around $23,000. That means you’d be spending $276,000 a year on your primary house.
For the person with $2.1 million in after-tax income, that leaves around $1.8 million for the year, or $150,000 per month. So, each month, you’d have nearly twice as much to save or spend as the typical household earns in a year.
What would your life be like? Among those who fly on their private jets, sail their yachts, enjoy their summer homes in the mountains, and vacation in extravagant style are lots of Main Street Millionaires who come from far humbler beginnings.
Let’s look over the shoulder of a typical Main Street Millionaire as he goes about his work. Who is he and what is his life like? How does he spend his time and money?
In Frisco, Texas, Ben Caballero wakes up every morning at 5 a.m. Looking in the bathroom mirror, he sees a thinly trimmed white beard that matches the white horseshoe hair on his head.
After eating a breakfast of oats with milk and berries, he watches the 5:30 a.m. news and checks email and his online home-selling platform, HomesUSA. At 7 a.m., he leaves for work in his GMC, arriving a half hour later at his real estate office in Addison, a suburb 15 miles north of Dallas and 70 miles south of the Red River on the border with Oklahoma.
Owning a big share of a small company is the typical path to pass-through wealth.
With 22 employees, his firm specializes in selling new homes. On a typical morning, he catches up with his team, meets with clients, and gives a presentation to a client’s salespeople about HomesUSA. Caballero eats lunch—usually the vegetable plate—every day at Luby’s, a cafeteria-style diner with several locations across Texas. A few times each week, and after some postlunch meetings with employees, he meets his personal trainer at 4:30 p.m. at the local gym. He then heads home, arriving around 6:15 p.m., when his fiancée greets him with dinner. After they eat together, Caballero may watch a football game on TV, but usually calls it a night before 10 p.m.
Don’t let Caballero’s modest lifestyle fool you, however. A real estate agent, a former homebuilder, and the founder of HomesUSA, he was worth an estimated $3.7 billion in 2022.
In its structure, Caballero’s firm is fairly typical. We looked at every pass-through firm in America—the sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations that, like HomesUSA, are not subject to corporate income tax because their profits “pass through” to their owners and are taxed like individual income—from 2000 to 2022 and found that the median firm with at least one owner in the top 0.1 percent in income generates around $25 million in revenue every year. It has around 30 employees and only two or three owners. A firm is generally worth about one to two times its revenue, so a firm with $25 million in revenue generally is worth between $25 million and $50 million. (Why? Because a firm’s owners effectively own the right to receive its current and future profits, and practitioners use formulas to convert those profits into a single valuation—expressed as a multiple of current assets, profits, or revenues.)
Not only is each of these firms “closely held”—i.e., only a small number of people own most of it—but the owners also tend to be singularly focused on it rather than on a host of business ventures. To put it another way, most top business owners own only one firm. And more than 9 out of 10 pass-through owners say they actively participate in their firms.
Some business owners grow wealthy by closely holding their one company and reinvesting the profits into it over the long term. Owning a big share of a small company is the typical path to pass-through wealth. Around three-quarters of all profits accruing to the top owners of pass-throughs come from firms with less than $75 million in profits.
The superstar public companies with galactic executive pay packages that we often hear about, such as Apple, J.P. Morgan, and Nvidia are quite different from pass-through firms. Four-fifths of pass-through profits come from firms with less than $750 million in annual revenue. By contrast, essentially all the profits from traditional C corporations, including publicly traded companies, come from firms that are larger.
We often hear stories about the cozy relationships between managers and corporate boards that set excessive pay packages. In a famous example, the Mattel CEO resigned in 2000 amid poor performance at the company, and the board rewarded her by forgiving a $4.2 million loan and allowing unvested stock options to vest. These payments came on top of a $26.4 million termination payment and retirement benefits of more $700,000 per year.
When such favoritism occurs, a firm’s owners lose out because there are so many of them, which limits the control that any one of them can impose over executive decisions. These stories, however, don’t apply to the vast multitude of Main Street Millionaires because pass-through owners are often both the managers and the majority owners of their own firms.
Who is the typical business owner? Let’s start with the typical decamillionaire business owner. He—and it’s usually a “he”—is a white, 62-year-old, working, college graduate. Nine out of 10 decamillionaire business owners are married (compared to 60 percent of the overall population of those aged 40 to 70).
As all these cases of conspicuous consumption show, Main Street Millionaires are central figures in the saga of rising inequality.
Jon Zimmerman fits the profile to a T. He and his wife bought a car wash in Milwaukee in 2010, expanded their business to four locations over the next 13 years, and sold it in 2022 to a private equity firm for $19 million. That sale put them in the top 1 percent in wealth, which in 2022 included everyone with at least $13.6 million.
Most decamillionaire business owners are in their 50s, 60s, or 70s. Less than 10 percent of them are younger than 40 simply because accumulating wealth and growing a business take time.
You might think that, since they’re predominantly well advanced in years, these business owners are all self-made men. But some of them were lucky enough to inherit a business and didn’t assume full ownership of it until the older generation (normally, about 30 years older) passed from the scene.
Because the wealthy tend to be older, younger readers might be wondering if they themselves are on track to reach the top 1 percent of income or wealth at some point. To help answer that question, they can calculate where they are among their age group at the moment. As of 2022, if you’re in your 20s, you need to be making at least $300,000 in income and have $2.1 million in wealth to be in the top 1 percent among twentysomethings. In your 40s, you need around four times as much income and wealth to be in the top 1 percent—$1.2 million in income and $8.5 million in wealth. In your 60s, you need $1.8 million in income and $19.4 million in wealth. In your 70s, when many stop working, you need $1 million in income and $18 million in wealth.
The thresholds for the top 0.1 percent follow similar patterns, although peak incomes come earlier—when those in this elite group reach their 40s. The threshold for income grows from $4 million in your 30s to $8.4 million in your 40s, and it then declines to $5.9 million in your 50s and $4.7 million in your 60s.
For the top 0.1 percent in wealth, the thresholds climb rapidly with age through the 60s and then fall a bit—$9.6 million in your 20s, $19.5 million in your 30s, $41.8 million in your 40s, $62.8 million in your 50s, $112.4 million in your 60s, and $94 million in your 70s. In other words, a person in their 60s must be almost six times richer than a person in their 30s to make it to the top 0.1 percent of wealth in their age group.
All told, baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) hold 50 percent of private business wealth, Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) hold a quarter, and millennials (born after 1980) and the Silent Generation (born between 1925 and 1945) each hold around 12 percent.
Some 80 percent of decamillionaire business owners have a college degree, and 40 percent have a postgraduate degree (e.g., DDS, JD, MBA, MD, PhD). These decamillionaire business owners are twice as likely to attend college and postgraduate school as the general population. But, interestingly enough, they’re less likely to go to college and graduate school than decamillionaires who don’t own businesses.
Main Street Millionaires who attend college are likelier to start businesses that provide dental, legal, medical, or veterinarian services, which require specialized degrees. Those who don’t attend college are likelier to start businesses in the trades, retail, wholesale, and multi-establishment restaurants.
As for decamillionaires who don’t own a business, nearly all of them went to college and three out of four of them earned postgraduate degrees. Thus, a college degree appears essential to growing rich if you don’t start a business but far less so if you do.
As it turns out, most new firms are small and remain that way. Of all new businesses in America each year, only about 10 percent reach $2 million in sales within two years. By then, they have about 20 workers, including active owners. Even after 10 years, the top 10 percent of firms based on their size are only slightly larger, at $2.5 million in sales and around 30 workers.
For the top 1 percent of new businesses, sales reach an average of $30 million in the second year and $50 million in a decade. They each have more than 100 workers after a few years and about 300 workers after a decade.
Ben Caballero comes straight out of central casting from the 1996 bestseller The Millionaire Next Door, which emphasized the relentless work ethic and surprisingly frugal consumption habits of America’s millionaires.
Our data paint a more nuanced picture of the lifestyles of the many rich Main Street Millionaires we have encountered in our research. As they reach their golden years, some live far more extravagantly and become prolific consumers.
The sales records of luxury homes in resort destinations such as Aspen are replete with examples. Joel Tauber ran a manufacturing firm in the stainless steel and alloy scrap industry in Detroit. He grew his father-in-law’s business to a billion-dollar conglomerate, with 30 factories and 2,000 employees. He bought his “ski-in, ski-out” mansion—that is, one close enough to the slopes to enable someone to ski directly to the lifts and back from the trails at the end of the day—from department-store heir Ted Field for $9 million in 1996 and sold it for $65 million in 2023.
In Aspen’s most expensive home transaction to date, Terry Taylor, a secretive car dealer, bought another ski-in, ski-out mansion, this one for $76 million. “He’s like Batman,” a source told Forbes. “You hear about him and you admire his work, but nobody has really ever seen him in real life.” He only attends conferences on the condition that no one introduces him to others. He doesn’t list his name on his dealerships that, instead, often keep the name of their previous owner, although the limited liability company that officially owns them often has a name like “TT of Palm Bay, Inc.” Taylor also lists his initials on other prized assets, including his $45 million private jet.
To find other wealthy private business owners who live extravagant lives, we bought owner registries of 22,000 private jets and 1,500 super yachts. We also bought private-jet data from JETNET and focused on the jets used for business purposes such as flying executives around. We bought the owner registry of super yachts from SuperYachtFan. These companies assemble their data from public registrations for private planes and boats. Unlike in the tax data, the names are not confidential.
These registries are full of Main Street Millionaires. The late Paul Andrews of Fort Worth, Texas, founded TTI, an electronic components distributor, and owned a $40 million super yacht, Abbracci, as well as a private jet. Ralph de la Torre, a doctor who ran the nation’s largest physician-owned hospital system, with 12.5 million patients per year, has a $40 million super yacht, Amaral.
Dozens of auto dealers own super yachts. Some super-yacht-owning car dealers also recently owned professional sports teams, including the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and New Orleans Saints, and the NBA’s Utah Jazz and New Orleans Pelicans. Not surprisingly, plenty of Main Street Millionaires who did not make their money from cars also own both yachts and professional sports teams. The late Rocky Wirtz, a Chicago beverage distributor, owned a yacht called the Blackhawk as well as the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks. Tilman Fertitta, a restaurateur, owns multiple yachts as well as the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
Concerns about inequality have been a prominent part of the public conversation in the US for at least the last 15 years, from the angry slogans of Occupy Wall Street to the ascendance of populist politicians and persistent calls for a national wealth tax. It’s easy to assume that when we have that conversation, we’re talking about the business world’s biggest celebrities. But as all these cases of conspicuous consumption show, Main Street Millionaires are central figures in the saga of rising inequality. They’re earning huge incomes and amassing great wealth, and they’re driving consumption inequality over time and across the country.
Owen Zidar is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton. Eric Zwick is the Joel F. Gemunder Professor of Economics and Finance at Chicago Booth. Excerpted from The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2026 by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. All rights reserved.
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