Sep 15, 2026 · 40 min · 10 segments
Send us Fan Mail Jeff and Scott talk with economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick about their new book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, in which they…
Eric ZwickGuest
Owen ZidarGuestScott DyrengHost
Jeff HoopesHost
So in asking in a simplified form, so what's the, I mean, you can just answer the question.
What is the answer to that question? Who does own business in the United States? What's the gist of the paper?
So just to take a step back, the book is about this hidden world that we discovered in working on this pass-through question of private business owners who are ordinary Americans who are extraordinarily wealthy.
And so who owns private business in America? It's wealthy, ordinary people who live all over.
They're owning ordinary and glamorous businesses like car dealerships or beverage distribution companies or law firms or dentist's offices.
And what we did in that paper was we took all of the S-Corps and partnerships and we tried to follow the money from the entities all the way to the owners because the K-1s create a link that we could follow.
And we found an estimate of how much tax those entities paid if you basically take an ownership-weighted share of all the owners' taxes.
So that will give you some idea of their income because they're being recorded like flows there.
How do you translate that income to wealth or does it even matter? Are you just sort of assuming like there's a lot of income so there must be wealth underlying it or how does that work?
these are the things you learn as a business school professor, right? Is how do you value private businesses? What are the ins, the outs, the what have yous there? So we, for different categories of income, right? You can think about different models for mapping that income to wealth.
And the hope is that you make assumptions that are not systematically biased, but they give you like a ballpark estimate.
So for a dollar of dividends, right? what's the average dividend yield you think this person might be receiving? That's sort of like the dividend divided by the value of the asset, right? And so if you flip that equation, you can estimate the value of the asset from the dividends received.
If you're a pass-through business owner, you get some income, but a lot of that income is actually labor income in disguise.
So the value of that business as sort of an asset is quite a bit lower than implied by the profits.
there's a lot of income flowing through, but you could sell a practice, but for much less as a share of kind of the income than if you're selling a car dealership or selling a mid-market manufacturer.
So you got to use like the industry, you got to use maybe assets, you use a measure of cash flows where you're trying to remove that labor income and you come up with the value of the business and to use kind of like multiples based approaches from private equity to value each of those businesses.
And then you have these ownership links and you throw them sort of the share of the business that the person owns in terms of the flows.
And you add up all the buckets, add up all the pieces, you get an estimate for wealth for these people.
So in asking in a simplified form, so what's the, I mean, you can just answer the question.
What is the answer to that question? Who does own business in the United States? What's the gist of the paper?
So just to take a step back, the book is about this hidden world that we discovered in working on this pass-through question of private business owners who are ordinary Americans who are extraordinarily wealthy.
And so who owns private business in America? It's wealthy, ordinary people who live all over.
They're owning ordinary and glamorous businesses like car dealerships or beverage distribution companies or law firms or dentist's offices.
And what we did in that paper was we took all of the S-Corps and partnerships and we tried to follow the money from the entities all the way to the owners because the K-1s create a link that we could follow.
And we found an estimate of how much tax those entities paid if you basically take an ownership-weighted share of all the owners' taxes.
So that will give you some idea of their income because they're being recorded like flows there.
How do you translate that income to wealth or does it even matter? Are you just sort of assuming like there's a lot of income so there must be wealth underlying it or how does that work?
these are the things you learn as a business school professor, right? Is how do you value private businesses? What are the ins, the outs, the what have yous there? So we, for different categories of income, right? You can think about different models for mapping that income to wealth.
And the hope is that you make assumptions that are not systematically biased, but they give you like a ballpark estimate.
So for a dollar of dividends, right? what's the average dividend yield you think this person might be receiving? That's sort of like the dividend divided by the value of the asset, right? And so if you flip that equation, you can estimate the value of the asset from the dividends received.
If you're a pass-through business owner, you get some income, but a lot of that income is actually labor income in disguise.
So the value of that business as sort of an asset is quite a bit lower than implied by the profits.
there's a lot of income flowing through, but you could sell a practice, but for much less as a share of kind of the income than if you're selling a car dealership or selling a mid-market manufacturer.
So you got to use like the industry, you got to use maybe assets, you use a measure of cash flows where you're trying to remove that labor income and you come up with the value of the business and to use kind of like multiples based approaches from private equity to value each of those businesses.
And then you have these ownership links and you throw them sort of the share of the business that the person owns in terms of the flows.
And you add up all the buckets, add up all the pieces, you get an estimate for wealth for these people.
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