Dick Portillo opened a hot-dog stand in 1963 without knowing how to cook a hot dog. He was the youngest of three, born in Chicago to immigrants from Mexico and Greece, raised partly in one of the city’s most notorious housing projects. He enlisted in the Marine Corps seven days after finishing high school in 1957 and counts his two years at Camp Pendleton among the most important of his life — teamwork, organizational planning, a deep appreciation for proper training. He put $1,100 into the stand. About half a century later he sold the company for $1 billion.
The proceeds bought a Chicago-area mansion, a private jet, a 12,000-square-foot waterfront house in Naples, Florida with its own dock, and a 130-foot yacht named Top Dog, which is the correct name. ‘I came from a poor family,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘and at one time thought I didn’t have anything to offer the world.’ At its peak the business had 4,000 employees, no franchises and no outside investors, and a single location could bring in $9 million a year — roughly three times a typical McDonald’s.
They are not rare, and they are not where you are looking
The economists Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar, writing in this weekend’s Review, argue Portillo’s story is not unusual. They call people like him Everywhere Millionaires — owners who built extraordinary fortunes running ordinary businesses, so plentiful now that we are living in America’s first Age of Millionaires. You probably know one without realizing it. The veterinarian who expanded into a regional network of practices. The commercial HVAC contractor whose trucks you see around town. The owner of the local restaurant chain that keeps opening locations. They are coaching your kid’s soccer team.
Their stories rarely make the news because the businesses are private and unglamorous. Portillo sold hot dogs, not some shiny new technology, and his success grew slowly over decades in the upper Midwest, away from the coasts. Meanwhile pop culture keeps portraying the rich as an elite few in the mold of the Rockefellers and Carnegies.
Two findings worth sitting with
The first is about the conventional ladder. Studying hard, getting into a top college and landing a good job is further out of reach than it was — tuition has surged and slots at elite schools have not expanded. But that ladder is not the only route, and it may not be the main one. The typical path to $10 million and above, the researchers write, comes from owning a company. That path exists in every town, in unglamorous industries, open to people without top test scores, fancy degrees or wealthy parents. The relationship between founding a star business and SAT scores is weak: the top 10% of test scorers become founders only 1.3 times as often as those at the median. What matters more is real working experience or early exposure to a family business.
The second finding is harsher and it is the one this desk keeps returning to. Wealth does not reliably survive the handoff. About 40% of the children of the top 1% fall out of the top fifth of income entirely. Neither competence nor grit passes down as dependably as a bank account does. The Review piece opens with a man pushed aside at a family firm that put the founder’s sons in the top jobs — he walked out, built his own auto empire, and eventually owned the Utah Jazz. Nepotism drives out talent, which is precisely why the door keeps opening for new entrants.
There is a third thing here that is not in the article but follows from it. A great deal of the wealth described in this piece is illiquid, concentrated and personally entangled — the owner is the business. That is a wonderful way to build a fortune and a fragile way to hold one. The planning questions that matter for a business owner are almost never about the market: what is it actually worth to someone else, who runs it if you cannot, and what happens to the family if the sale takes three years instead of three months?
If any of that describes you, or a client, or your brother-in-law with the HVAC trucks, the honest answer is that these questions get answered late far more often than they get answered early. It is fifteen minutes to find out which one you are — and the difference between a fortune built and a fortune kept usually gets decided in that conversation rather than in the market.