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The Millionaires You've Never Heard Of | Owen Zidar on How Americans Really Get Rich

Jimmy Connor Oct 2, 2026

Summary

Zidar's thesis: America's wealth is built mostly by owners of ordinary businesses - dealerships, restaurants, convenience stores - not Silicon Valley founders.

Zidar argues decades-long incremental compounding beats headline innovation; a hot dog stand, not a rocket company, built a billion-dollar brand.

Zidar credits pass-through tax structures, made attractive after 1986 rate cuts, with roughly half of US business profits and employment.

Failure does not disqualify US founders: half of startups are gone by year five, yet people who failed re-enter work and still out-earn peers.

Where you are born still matters; Zidar says Salt Lake City births make someone three times likelier to run a top-decile business than Memphis births.

Elon Musk's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Musk is a reference point for what the public already knows, not a subject of the episode: the interviewer opens the book discussion on the contrast, noting that "Everybody's heard of Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon." before turning to people nobody knows.
  • He is used twice more as a benchmark. The guest says this kind of wealth does not require moon-level invention, in contrast to stories of Musk and Jeff Bezos, "they're sending people to the moon"; the interviewer adds that the office-sleeping grind trait is likewise associated with Musk: "Especially during the ramp up of the Tesla Model 3."

Jimmy Connor's takeaways

  • Top takeaway He is the interviewer who sets up the episode: he read Owen Zidar's The Everywhere Millionaire and opens on a Coral Gables auto-dealership family he says spent "$60 million on their daughter's wedding", to show that American wealth sits somewhere people do not expect.
  • He frames the discussion as a contrast with his own market, telling viewers from his Toronto base that "I think a lot of Canadians, we're very conservative, okay?" and will not take the same kind of risk Americans will.
  • He supplies the quote that carries the franchise section, citing Russell Westbrook on where he invests his money: "Unsexy is sexy to me."
  • He largely stays out of the analytical role, asking the questions that open each block - whether owners go all in, the illicit-activity research, the pass-through tax system, and which US cities produce the most entrepreneurs - rather than asserting answers to them.
  • He is explicit about the limits of his own claims, flagging that he has heard the failure-stigma argument only second hand and adding that "I don't know, I can't speak to Canada."

Owen Zidar's takeaways

  • Top takeaway His thesis is that American wealth is broader than tech and finance and comes from ownership rather than invention: "You can find them in every town.", and somebody owns "all the things you walk by" without you thinking about them.
  • The repeatable method he draws out is identify a business, scale it, create operating efficiencies, then repeat it, and he is explicit that this is not a Silicon Valley get-rich-quick model - "It's grind over a long period of time."
  • On characteristics he stresses the hard work of first-generation owners but refuses the stereotype: "There are a lot of heirs of family businesses that showed up" in the private jet and super yacht data, and the research he cites finds many of these owners are troublemakers who push boundaries and are more likely than the typical person to have had youth infractions with police.
  • On failure and returns he cites "The startup failure rate is like 50% after five years", then argues from data covering the 10 million people who started a business in the 21st century that many bounced back into the labor force, and that a founder makes about 10% more than a very similar person, with the median several thousand dollars more a few years later.
  • His tax argument is that the 1986 cut in the individual income tax rate made pass-through structures such as S corporations and partnerships more attractive, and that they are now the vast majority of American businesses, at about half of profits and almost half of employment.