Publishers Weekly
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“Wealth in America is more abundant, and closer to home, than most people think,” contend economists Zidar and Zwick in this illuminating examination of small business owners who have built extraordinary fortunes. The U.S. is home to three million “Main Street Millionaires,” the authors say, owners of private businesses, like car dealerships, convenience stores, and restaurants, whose average wealth is $25 million. One key to their accumulation of wealth is the tax code. By organizing their businesses as sole proprietorships or limited liability companies, they can avoid the corporate and dividend taxes that traditional C-corporations (like General Motors and IBM) have to pay. Zidar and Zwick profile an array of entrepreneurs, including Dick Portillo, who opened his first hot dog stand in a Chicago-area parking lot in 1963. By carefully managing every dollar, Portillo grew the business to 22 restaurants, and he eventually sold it for $1 billion. But there’s a dark side to these wealth stories, the authors reveal: as these millionaires’ businesses become more successful, they keep much of the resulting gains for themselves, opting for conspicuous consumption—like $60 million weddings—rather than sharing profits with employees, and thereby driving income inequality. At turns inspiring and maddening, this is a vivid depiction of America’s millionaire class. (Sept.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The rich are everywhere, hiding in plain sight. Economists Zidar (Princeton) and Zwick (Chicago) gained early insight into the little-explored world of “Main Street Millionaires” when they built a database for the Treasury Department to document how much business owners were paying in taxes. They discovered that, thanks to “pass-through” affordances in the tax code, the number was less than one might think. These pass-through provisions allow business owners to file profits and losses as individual income, at a rate lower than corporate taxes. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Gates may make the news, but, as the authors put it, “we’ve missed the vast forest of American entrepreneurs for a few redwoods in Silicon Valley.” Indeed, as they document, at the top of the scale, private business owners earn half again as much as the CEOs of publicly owned corporations. “Put another way: There are 25 ultra-rich auto dealers for every member of the Forbes 400.” Among the wealthiest are the founders of travel stops such as Loves, Sheetz, and Buc-ee’s, the first of which reportedly earned $26.5 billion in 2023. An entrepreneur who built an empire of bakeries that made hamburger buns for McDonald’s ended his life with a fortune of a quarter-billion. What distinguished him from many other 1 percenters was that he lived simply, saying, “I’m just a little Greek baker that got lucky.” Others live higher on the hog: Zidar and Zwick’s opening anecdote concerns married car dealers who spent $60 million on their daughter’s wedding. Not surprisingly, as the authors quantify, ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the ranks of the privately wealthy, which, they argue, can be remedied by “providing more labor market experience in entrepreneurial sectors.” They also call for higher tax rates, health-insurance reforms, raising the minimum wage, and other measures to level the playing field. An eye-opening account of a nearly invisible economy. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.