Americans Don’t Understand Who’s Rich

Terry Taylor is worth about $2 billion , and you have almost surely never heard of him.

Based in Florida, he doesn’t put his name on the car dealerships that he buys up, and he reportedly attends conferences only on the condition that no one announces who he is.

Taylor came to our attention in 2023, when he paid $76 million for an Aspen mansion—then the most expensive home sale in the Colorado town’s history.

In 2024, Forbes magazine, which keeps tabs on the richest people in the United States and around the world, slotted Taylor in at No.

1,694 on its World Billionaires List and published a profile titled “The Car Dealership Billionaire No One Knows.” “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.” When Americans picture the ultrarich, they typically think of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth lies predominantly in shares of publicly traded companies.

They might also think of Wall Street financiers and celebrities such as Taylor Swift.

But far more typical are figures like Terry Taylor—which is to say, owners of successful privately held businesses.

We are economists who have been studying taxation and inequality for more than a decade.

By our calculations, about 1.7 million Americans have each built a net worth of at least $10 million by owning a private business.

For every CEO of a public company, there are more than 1,000 private-business owners with a net worth of more than $25 million.

In the course of our research, we’ve come to call these people “everywhere millionaires” because they exist all around the country, in a huge range of industries.

Perhaps not surprising, some of these millionaires have stakes in investment firms or medical, dental, or legal practices.

But the ranks of everywhere millionaires also include a repo man from Henderson, Nevada; a car-wash owner from Milwaukee; a treated-lumber magnate from Alabama; a boat-cover maker from the Ozarks. [ Ray D.