There Are 1,000 Private Business Owners Worth $25 Million for Every Large Public Company CEO

On the September 18, 2026 episode of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, one of the economist co-authors of the new book The Everywhere Millionaire dropped a ratio that should reframe how anyone pictures the American rich: “there’s a thousand private business owners that have $25 million for every large public company CEO, according to Odd Lots (Bloomberg). Like, we’ve missed all of these people.” The episode, “There’s a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America,” features co-author Eric Zwick, a professor of economics and finance at Chicago Booth, and his Princeton co-author, walking through what anonymous tax-return data reveals about the population of wealthy Americans that conventional coverage of the rich has largely ignored.

What This Ratio Actually Measures

The comparison is narrow and deliberate. On one side sit the chief executives of large public companies, a group of a few hundred people whose pay packages, proxy filings, and stock sales get parsed line by line every quarter. On the other side sit private business owners at a stated wealth level of $25 million, identified through anonymous IRS tax data rather than through public disclosures, rich lists, or self-reporting.

The authors’ claim is that for every one of those large public company CEOs, there are a thousand private owners meeting that wealth bar, according to Odd Lots (Bloomberg). It is an attributed finding, not a derived figure, and it is deliberately framed as a ratio because the underlying tax data is anonymous. That anonymity is exactly why this population went uncounted for so long: researchers could see the income signatures of pass-through business owners in IRS microdata, but they could not attach names to them. Public-company executives, by contrast, are named in every 10-K and proxy. One group is fully lit; the other has been sitting in the dark.

Who These Private Owners Actually Are

They are not the founders on magazine covers. When the authors sorted pass-through business income in the top 1%, auto dealers were the number one bucket, a result the researchers said was “not the Piketty story of like billionaire tech or finance.” To put names to the anonymized signatures, they went hunting through yacht and jet registration data, where the same dealers kept surfacing as owners.

The book organizes the archetypes as an alphabet. As one co-author put it on the episode, “A is for auto dealer, B is for beverage distribution business owner, and then C is for contractor. D is dentist.” Medical and dental practice owners, regional distributors, HVAC operators, and veterinary chains all fit the mold. Many of the exits, the hosts noted, now come in the form of a private equity buyout of these mid-market operators.

Why This Matters if You Will Never Own a Car Dealership

When the visible sliver of the rich is a rounding error next to the actual group, the debates that key off that visible sliver get aimed at the wrong target. Executive compensation reform, wealth-tax modeling, and pop-culture assumptions about how large fortunes get built all lean heavily on the public-company CEO template, roughly one part in a thousand of the population at that wealth tier when measured against the private owner count the authors describe, according to Odd Lots (Bloomberg).

For an investor, the practical read-through is different. The buyers of these businesses, and increasingly the sellers on the other side of private equity transactions, sit inside a population that public-market coverage barely acknowledges exists. As one co-author put it on the episode, “for the first time, you can trace back, where did these people come from?” Retail brokerage flows, muni bond demand, small-bank deposit bases, and regional real estate bids all lean on this cohort in ways the CEO-centric frame cannot see.

The headline number is a ratio, not a tally, and it belongs to the book’s authors, not to any official statistic. Treated on its own terms, it does one useful thing: it forces a recount of who the rich in America actually are. The dentist who sold to a rollup, the beverage distributor with three warehouses, and the contractor with a fleet of trucks are the median members of the $25 million club, not the exception to it.

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