The football analogy is interesting to extend: the NFL roster spots open up every year, such that the roster turns over, keeping churn happening and keeping opportunity open. The deca-millionaire spots don't/won't work that way. These are mostly 62-year-old men sitting on closely held businesses, and the tax code is built to move those businesses down the family line rather than back into open competition. So the the odds aren't just long. Most of the spots are already spoken for and are being passed down. 🤷🏻♀️
Actually I was thinking the NFL analogy doesn’t fit for the opposite reason. There’s not a cap on the number of businesses that can be started or owned, or on the amount of wealth that can be created. You can’t just start a new NFL team, but anyone can start a business in America.
Sure the odds may be long to get to decamillionaire status, but who cares if your piece of the pie is small if it’s still sweet and satisfying?
If that American apple pie keeps growing as it has, lots more people can get rich (and richer) every year.
The NFL analogy was making more careers, not creating new teams. Any high school athlete can theoretically have an NFL career, but the odds are like the odds of becoming a decamillionaire businessman. People aren’t upset they have a small, satisfying piece of the pie, like the boomers. They’re upset to be barely hanging onto a crumb of the pie that fell on the floor.
The writing is great and I love reading your takes even if I often disagree with your conclusions. I suspect we hold very different stories about how the world works, but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and critiques. And I especially enjoy the links you share to other articles. That New York Times piece was incredible and I wouldn't have likely heard about it if you hadn't have shared. So thank you.
I doubt you need the encouragement, but if you do, please keep going with this format, I really appreciate it and always look forward to your emails/blog post.
Well stealthy wealthy is going on my hinge profile as the new way to describe white collar ambition with blue collar skillset and yes I’d like them to coach my son’s soccer team as well.
I just finished listening to the podcast series “Nice White Parents”. It resonated and hit hard in the ethical struggle to be a part of the solution in lifting up ALL kids in the collective, v. feeling the responsibility as a parent to give your child as many advantages as possible to enter this harsh world as an adult. Lots of food for thought! Keep up the good work this is definitely my favorite newsletter that hits every week!
you should listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones two part series on This American Life called The Problem We All Live with. About education in Missouri. I listened to it years ago and it radicalized me about the state of education in this country
Thanks I'll check it out. For the record, my battle is not Public school vs Private. We are and always will be Public School attendees....but WHICH Public School (do we live in the city and allow our kids to attend poor performing neighborhood schools, or move to the suburbs and attend high ranking ones). Excited to check out the series to expand my thinking.
I've been thinking about 'own or be owned' a lot lately, since I entered the owning class. It's a sweet deal. VT grows and pays my bills and I get to play at entrepreneurship with no economic pressure.
I wonder if it's possible to democratize ownership to the point that everyone gets to live like I do. Working for a paycheck for 20 years and then 'Productive' by choice thereafter.
In the millionaire cinematic universe, I wonder what you make of the Costco worker millionaire headline that was going around recently? The article has followed me everywhere and I assumed there was something fishy about it, but just went back and scanned after reading this and maybe it’s a model of pay and benefits that does support the worker? I find myself suspicious at how/why Wall Street Journal even found this story, but also Costco generally feels like the best big retail option of all the big retailers. 🤷♀️
I'm not familiar with the Costco story, but in the south we have a grocery store chain called Publix and the ex-partner of a relative who's now in his 60s-70s became a multimillionaire as a warehouse worker. He started with the company as a teen, didn't go to college if I recall correctly, and never even became a manager. I'm not sure if the company still offers ownership options to employees, but at least when he started they did and that's how he got to be so rich. People of his generation who are so adamant about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps fail to account for the fact that they majorly lucked out timing-wise!
Publix is still employee owned! When I first moved to Atlanta I thought Publix was so weird. The stores were smaller and it was harder to find things, but there were plenty of employees to ask for help and keep the shelves stocked. Then I found out they were employee owned and it all made sense.
I do think having a million after a lifetime of contributing to a 401k under the stock market over the last 30 years is not ground breaking or unusual, and yes influenced by timing. I am happy the costco mans wife’s cancer treatment was covered completely and he got time off to be with her. Those are the sort of things that can really knock a life off course, so good for costco there.
Love the public ownership of publix though, that is the difference between security under the Costco model and something that shares and builds actual wealth for employees! I guess the closest thing we have in the west is WinCo? The biggest grocery store brands here in Cali went through a series of leveraged buyout consolidation in the 80’s and 90’s so instead of the wealth accruing to the workers like publix, they went to Ron Burkle, very vulture capitalist moves, leveraged buyouts paid for by cost cuts. Then there were strikes in the 2000’s, but that preserved benefits for current employees and set a lower pay track for new employees.
It’s timing, but also reminds me a lot of the DL episode about Hooters: Publix shows us the employee owned version of the sliding doors options and Kroger the leveraged buyout version. Cosctco somewhere in the middle.
Not to make it all about me 😂, but in my next book (fiction; romcom) the main character is a successful business consultant who caters to these "stealthy wealthy" dudes. She's playfully called the 'Boomer Whisperer' and helps old guys finally retire and make bank from selling their businesses.
What we all want to see and understand, the matrix is building up a new carrot 🥕 "millionaire" as the status quo. Yes, 💯 40 years ago "middle-class" was (was) the status to have or work to have?
I have been thinking for two weeks about this new push to build up the "millionaire" status as potential (don't like that word, but) the new American Dream.
You can see how easily some of the content on YouTube is channeling this idea
I agree and think this shift is largely due to outdated definitions of what makes someone middle class. A six figure earning in the 80s and 90s bought a very different lifestyle than it does for someone today, not only due to increased cost of living but also the debt crisis.
I think at the end of the day, people are looking for relative security and comfort, knowing they'll have a (good) roof over their head, good food, an annual vacation, and if you have to drop as much as a car costs today you want it to not just be reliable but also to be something you don't mind looking at, etc. Millionaire is a much simpler target to grasp than "okay calculate all of these monthly expenses and calculate your ideal salary is somewhere between $300-600K."
To paraphrase something Morgan Housel and Seth Godin have said 'the right amount of money is a little bit more than your friends'.
The 300-600K figure annually is absolutely wild, you can be wealthy and even rich, even in NYC or London, on far less, especially for lifestyle picture you painted.
Thank you, so much, for including the NYT link to the Nikole Hannah-Jones article! Although so disheartening where we are still at 70 years later, it was incredibly eye opening.
The Everywhere Millionaire makes a fair point — a lot of wealth in this country is quieter than the Forbes 400 headlines suggest, sitting in HVAC companies and car dealerships rather than Silicon Valley. But the picture it paints, of a millionaire class that's mostly white, male, and boomer-aged, tells a story about who's had the most time to build wealth, not who's actually allowed to.
The numbers back this up: nearly 8 in 10 millionaires are self-made, and 4 in 5 grew up middle-income or below. Women's share of global millionaire wealth keeps climbing too. That's not a closed club — it's an open path that more people are walking every year.
The book also sells the trades short. It points to dentists and contractors as small potatoes next to law and finance, but that misses what's happening right now — private equity is pouring into plumbing and HVAC roll-ups, one firm alone says it's minted 30+ millionaires in just four years, and more people bought trade businesses last year than ever before. This isn't a folksy footnote — it's one of the most active wealth-building lanes going.
And there's a piece missing entirely: the GI Bill. Free college and cheap home loans for millions of returning WWII vets may be the single biggest driver of the boomer wealth boom this book is really describing — bigger than any tax loophole. Worth saying honestly: it wasn't applied evenly, and discriminatory lending shut a lot of Black veterans out of those same benefits. That's a real and lasting part of the story. But acknowledging that doesn't weaken the point — it just means the full picture includes both a massive government investment and the unfairness in how it was delivered, not one or the other.
Bottom line: this is a much more open story than "family men hiding in plain sight" makes it sound.
The "Essense of Capitalism" is the small business owner takes out loans he has to repay in order to cover payroll for workers week in and week out. They get paid, the owner hopes for future returns. Inequality in Risk as well as Reward. I don't know any small business owners who don't work at least 6 days/60 hours a week. And I've known plenty who still went under after years of doing so. But they always covered payroll for the 9-5ers...
This is an excellent essay. American inequality and injustice have been justified with the notion that unlimited wealth is right around the corner for anyone with a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed attitude.
Toward the beginning of this essay you referred to publications, in the late 50's, which promised an easy route to unlimited affluence. That sun-shiney attitude predates the 50's by at least 3 decades
On the eve of the Great Depression, in 1928 or 1929, a professor from Yale University wrote an article or a book which promised that faithful investments in the stock exchange could make any man of modest means a millionaire.
A capitalist is someone who buys something for 10 dollars and convinces some poor shnook that it is worth 40 dollars.
That is the ESSENCE OF CAPITALISM. It is larceny light. Business with the manners of hi falutin people playing bridge. A carnival of conversion. Dreck (yiddish for shit) dressed up as the Duke of Wales.
This reminds me of an article in the Seattle Times a few years ago on new wealth data which included a bunch of factoids about how likely you were to be surrounded by multi-millionaires in Seattle at any given time (very). As you can imagine, the comments were 100% MMs explaining how millions really isn't so much, they are frugal (hoarding) and even go camping sometimes! And of course, that their wealth is deserved bc they did x, y, z. It was infuriating and made me more skeptical of my neighbors. 😖
Regarding Hannah-Jones essay. It's always difficult with a study of one person, and the story isn't over. While Charlotte isn't NYC, my children thrived in public school. Though they were in magnet programs as opposed to the neighborhood school (still high poverty). And as adults I see their connection to the broad community that I'm not sure would have occurred in a private school. (But one can never know what the counterfactual outcome would be for them or for Hannah-Jones daughter). Like Hannah-Jones I did have the privilege of always having a choice.
The football analogy is interesting to extend: the NFL roster spots open up every year, such that the roster turns over, keeping churn happening and keeping opportunity open. The deca-millionaire spots don't/won't work that way. These are mostly 62-year-old men sitting on closely held businesses, and the tax code is built to move those businesses down the family line rather than back into open competition. So the the odds aren't just long. Most of the spots are already spoken for and are being passed down. 🤷🏻♀️
Damn this is a great point
Indeed
Actually I was thinking the NFL analogy doesn’t fit for the opposite reason. There’s not a cap on the number of businesses that can be started or owned, or on the amount of wealth that can be created. You can’t just start a new NFL team, but anyone can start a business in America.
Sure the odds may be long to get to decamillionaire status, but who cares if your piece of the pie is small if it’s still sweet and satisfying?
If that American apple pie keeps growing as it has, lots more people can get rich (and richer) every year.
The NFL analogy was making more careers, not creating new teams. Any high school athlete can theoretically have an NFL career, but the odds are like the odds of becoming a decamillionaire businessman. People aren’t upset they have a small, satisfying piece of the pie, like the boomers. They’re upset to be barely hanging onto a crumb of the pie that fell on the floor.
I love these newsletters!
The writing is great and I love reading your takes even if I often disagree with your conclusions. I suspect we hold very different stories about how the world works, but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and critiques. And I especially enjoy the links you share to other articles. That New York Times piece was incredible and I wouldn't have likely heard about it if you hadn't have shared. So thank you.
I doubt you need the encouragement, but if you do, please keep going with this format, I really appreciate it and always look forward to your emails/blog post.
I’m only on P5 and I needed to head down here to applaud use of “MCU”… brill 😁
Well stealthy wealthy is going on my hinge profile as the new way to describe white collar ambition with blue collar skillset and yes I’d like them to coach my son’s soccer team as well.
I just finished listening to the podcast series “Nice White Parents”. It resonated and hit hard in the ethical struggle to be a part of the solution in lifting up ALL kids in the collective, v. feeling the responsibility as a parent to give your child as many advantages as possible to enter this harsh world as an adult. Lots of food for thought! Keep up the good work this is definitely my favorite newsletter that hits every week!
you should listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones two part series on This American Life called The Problem We All Live with. About education in Missouri. I listened to it years ago and it radicalized me about the state of education in this country
Thanks I'll check it out. For the record, my battle is not Public school vs Private. We are and always will be Public School attendees....but WHICH Public School (do we live in the city and allow our kids to attend poor performing neighborhood schools, or move to the suburbs and attend high ranking ones). Excited to check out the series to expand my thinking.
I've been thinking about 'own or be owned' a lot lately, since I entered the owning class. It's a sweet deal. VT grows and pays my bills and I get to play at entrepreneurship with no economic pressure.
I wonder if it's possible to democratize ownership to the point that everyone gets to live like I do. Working for a paycheck for 20 years and then 'Productive' by choice thereafter.
In the millionaire cinematic universe, I wonder what you make of the Costco worker millionaire headline that was going around recently? The article has followed me everywhere and I assumed there was something fishy about it, but just went back and scanned after reading this and maybe it’s a model of pay and benefits that does support the worker? I find myself suspicious at how/why Wall Street Journal even found this story, but also Costco generally feels like the best big retail option of all the big retailers. 🤷♀️
I'm not familiar with the Costco story, but in the south we have a grocery store chain called Publix and the ex-partner of a relative who's now in his 60s-70s became a multimillionaire as a warehouse worker. He started with the company as a teen, didn't go to college if I recall correctly, and never even became a manager. I'm not sure if the company still offers ownership options to employees, but at least when he started they did and that's how he got to be so rich. People of his generation who are so adamant about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps fail to account for the fact that they majorly lucked out timing-wise!
Publix is still employee owned! When I first moved to Atlanta I thought Publix was so weird. The stores were smaller and it was harder to find things, but there were plenty of employees to ask for help and keep the shelves stocked. Then I found out they were employee owned and it all made sense.
Here’s the costco article https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/he-earns-33-an-hour-as-a-costco-cashier-now-he-s-a-millionaire/ar-AA27vpPJ
I do think having a million after a lifetime of contributing to a 401k under the stock market over the last 30 years is not ground breaking or unusual, and yes influenced by timing. I am happy the costco mans wife’s cancer treatment was covered completely and he got time off to be with her. Those are the sort of things that can really knock a life off course, so good for costco there.
Love the public ownership of publix though, that is the difference between security under the Costco model and something that shares and builds actual wealth for employees! I guess the closest thing we have in the west is WinCo? The biggest grocery store brands here in Cali went through a series of leveraged buyout consolidation in the 80’s and 90’s so instead of the wealth accruing to the workers like publix, they went to Ron Burkle, very vulture capitalist moves, leveraged buyouts paid for by cost cuts. Then there were strikes in the 2000’s, but that preserved benefits for current employees and set a lower pay track for new employees.
It’s timing, but also reminds me a lot of the DL episode about Hooters: Publix shows us the employee owned version of the sliding doors options and Kroger the leveraged buyout version. Cosctco somewhere in the middle.
Not to make it all about me 😂, but in my next book (fiction; romcom) the main character is a successful business consultant who caters to these "stealthy wealthy" dudes. She's playfully called the 'Boomer Whisperer' and helps old guys finally retire and make bank from selling their businesses.
What we all want to see and understand, the matrix is building up a new carrot 🥕 "millionaire" as the status quo. Yes, 💯 40 years ago "middle-class" was (was) the status to have or work to have?
I have been thinking for two weeks about this new push to build up the "millionaire" status as potential (don't like that word, but) the new American Dream.
You can see how easily some of the content on YouTube is channeling this idea
Love this piece 🧩
I agree and think this shift is largely due to outdated definitions of what makes someone middle class. A six figure earning in the 80s and 90s bought a very different lifestyle than it does for someone today, not only due to increased cost of living but also the debt crisis.
I think at the end of the day, people are looking for relative security and comfort, knowing they'll have a (good) roof over their head, good food, an annual vacation, and if you have to drop as much as a car costs today you want it to not just be reliable but also to be something you don't mind looking at, etc. Millionaire is a much simpler target to grasp than "okay calculate all of these monthly expenses and calculate your ideal salary is somewhere between $300-600K."
To paraphrase something Morgan Housel and Seth Godin have said 'the right amount of money is a little bit more than your friends'.
The 300-600K figure annually is absolutely wild, you can be wealthy and even rich, even in NYC or London, on far less, especially for lifestyle picture you painted.
Thank you, so much, for including the NYT link to the Nikole Hannah-Jones article! Although so disheartening where we are still at 70 years later, it was incredibly eye opening.
The Everywhere Millionaire makes a fair point — a lot of wealth in this country is quieter than the Forbes 400 headlines suggest, sitting in HVAC companies and car dealerships rather than Silicon Valley. But the picture it paints, of a millionaire class that's mostly white, male, and boomer-aged, tells a story about who's had the most time to build wealth, not who's actually allowed to.
The numbers back this up: nearly 8 in 10 millionaires are self-made, and 4 in 5 grew up middle-income or below. Women's share of global millionaire wealth keeps climbing too. That's not a closed club — it's an open path that more people are walking every year.
The book also sells the trades short. It points to dentists and contractors as small potatoes next to law and finance, but that misses what's happening right now — private equity is pouring into plumbing and HVAC roll-ups, one firm alone says it's minted 30+ millionaires in just four years, and more people bought trade businesses last year than ever before. This isn't a folksy footnote — it's one of the most active wealth-building lanes going.
And there's a piece missing entirely: the GI Bill. Free college and cheap home loans for millions of returning WWII vets may be the single biggest driver of the boomer wealth boom this book is really describing — bigger than any tax loophole. Worth saying honestly: it wasn't applied evenly, and discriminatory lending shut a lot of Black veterans out of those same benefits. That's a real and lasting part of the story. But acknowledging that doesn't weaken the point — it just means the full picture includes both a massive government investment and the unfairness in how it was delivered, not one or the other.
Bottom line: this is a much more open story than "family men hiding in plain sight" makes it sound.
The "Essense of Capitalism" is the small business owner takes out loans he has to repay in order to cover payroll for workers week in and week out. They get paid, the owner hopes for future returns. Inequality in Risk as well as Reward. I don't know any small business owners who don't work at least 6 days/60 hours a week. And I've known plenty who still went under after years of doing so. But they always covered payroll for the 9-5ers...
This is an excellent essay. American inequality and injustice have been justified with the notion that unlimited wealth is right around the corner for anyone with a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed attitude.
Toward the beginning of this essay you referred to publications, in the late 50's, which promised an easy route to unlimited affluence. That sun-shiney attitude predates the 50's by at least 3 decades
On the eve of the Great Depression, in 1928 or 1929, a professor from Yale University wrote an article or a book which promised that faithful investments in the stock exchange could make any man of modest means a millionaire.
A capitalist is someone who buys something for 10 dollars and convinces some poor shnook that it is worth 40 dollars.
That is the ESSENCE OF CAPITALISM. It is larceny light. Business with the manners of hi falutin people playing bridge. A carnival of conversion. Dreck (yiddish for shit) dressed up as the Duke of Wales.
This reminds me of an article in the Seattle Times a few years ago on new wealth data which included a bunch of factoids about how likely you were to be surrounded by multi-millionaires in Seattle at any given time (very). As you can imagine, the comments were 100% MMs explaining how millions really isn't so much, they are frugal (hoarding) and even go camping sometimes! And of course, that their wealth is deserved bc they did x, y, z. It was infuriating and made me more skeptical of my neighbors. 😖
Regarding Hannah-Jones essay. It's always difficult with a study of one person, and the story isn't over. While Charlotte isn't NYC, my children thrived in public school. Though they were in magnet programs as opposed to the neighborhood school (still high poverty). And as adults I see their connection to the broad community that I'm not sure would have occurred in a private school. (But one can never know what the counterfactual outcome would be for them or for Hannah-Jones daughter). Like Hannah-Jones I did have the privilege of always having a choice.