Dick Portillo opened a hot-dog stand in 1963 without knowing how to cook a hot dog. Half a century later he sold the company for $1 billion. The proceeds bought a Chicago-area mansion, a private jet and a 12,000-square-foot waterfront home in Naples, Fla., with its own dock to moor his 130-foot yacht, Top Dog.

"I came from a poor family and at one time thought I didn't have anything to offer the world," Portillo wrote in a memoir. The youngest of three children, he was born in Chicago to immigrants from Mexico and Greece and raised partly in one of the city's most notorious housing projects.

By 2014, the stand he'd built with $1,100 had become the Midwest's largest privately owned restaurant company with 4,000 employees and no franchises or outside investors. A single Portillo's could bring in $9 million a year, roughly three times a typical McDonald's.

Stories like Portillo's rarely make the news. His business was private. He sold hot dogs, not some shiny new technology. His success grew slowly over decades and in the upper Midwest away from the coasts.

But Portillo's story is hardly unique. Across America, such business owners-we call them Everywhere Millionaires-have built extraordinary fortunes running ordinary businesses. Some launched their own ventures, working long hours and reinvesting the profits to stay afloat and grow. Others inherited a family firm and built upon the success of prior generations.

Pop culture portrays the rich as an elite few, akin to the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the Gilded Age. But rich private business owners are now so plentiful that we're living in America's first Age of Millionaires.

You probably know an Everywhere Millionaire, even if you don't realize it. They're coaching your child's soccer team, sitting next to you at a community fundraiser or chatting with you at a neighborhood barbecue. They might be the veterinarian who expanded his office to a regional network of practices, the commercial HVAC contractor whose trucks you see around town or the owner of that local restaurant chain that keeps opening new locations. They're hiding in plain sight, as ordinary people who run businesses woven into the fabric of everyday life.

There are three million of them, collectively worth more than $65 trillion, according to our analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances. The number of $100 million-plus business owners has, adjusting for inflation, more than quadrupled since 2001. Far more than a few high-profile billionaires on the coasts, these are the real rich in America.

Even so, faith in the American Dream is fading. Many doubt the next generation will achieve the better life it has long promised. Cynics argue that rising wealth inequality necessarily implies that a rising share of wealth comes from inheritance and that children of the wealthy enjoy enormous advantages, from schooling to financial cushions and connections.

They have a point. Our research found that a child from a rich family has six times the chance of starting a successful business as a poor one.

Yet, the typical star founder is not a rich kid. Most come from poor or middle-class families, simply because there are 99 times as many people in the bottom 99% as in the top 1%. Among star founders, there are 2.5 times as many from poor backgrounds as from the top 1%. Only about a quarter of business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies.

Maintaining a thriving business across generations is easier said than done. Consider the late auto executive Larry H. Miller. As a young parts manager, he took one dealership's parts department from 961st in the country to No.1 within 28 months. After rising to operations manager for five dealerships, he then learned, over breakfast at a Denny's, that the owner was demoting him to install his sons in the top jobs. Miller walked out and built an auto empire of his own. His vast holdings eventually included the Utah Jazz.

Nepotism drives out talent like Miller's, and neither competence nor grit can be passed down as reliably as a bank account. About 40% of the children of the top 1% fall out of the top fifth of income entirely. Which is precisely why the door stays open for new entrants.

Once a mainstay of the American Dream, the conventional ladder of studying hard, going to a top college and landing a good job seems further out of reach. Tuition has surged and slots at top schools have not expanded. But that ladder is not the only path upward.

Indeed, the typical path to $10 million and up comes from owning a company. That path is open in every town, in unglamorous industries, to people without top test scores, fancy degrees or rich parents.

And you don't need to be a genius to be a successful entrepreneur. The relationship between starting a star business and SAT scores is, in fact, quite weak. The top 10% of test scorers become founders of businesses only 1.3 times as often as those at the median. What matters more is real experience in the working world or early exposure to a family business.

Portillo, for example, didn't go to college. He enlisted in the Marine Corps seven days after graduating high school in 1957, and he considers his two years at Camp Pendleton among the most important of his life. They taught him teamwork, organizational planning and a deep appreciation for proper training, all of which he later used in building his business.

And increasingly, the opportunity of "unsexy" businesses is drawing elite graduates away from the traditional big-city jobs.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Jennifer Braus spent a year shopping for a company to buy. She cold-called business brokers and small firms, "scouring the earth trying to find something" to acquire and run. It was lonely and often disheartening. "I probably looked at 10,000 deals in my year of searching," she told us. "And every day was just no, no, no, not that one. And then you get one that's a maybe, and it turns into a no." She finally settled on Systems Design, an ambulance billing company based in Poulsbo, Wash., nestled between Seattle and the Olympic Mountains.

Though the business was smaller than Braus had hoped, the renewal rate of its customers was staggeringly high, ensuring a recurring base of revenue. "It was just the best business we had seen," she said. "I could come in and do nothing and be pretty reasonably assured it would be a going concern."

When she was buying the company, Braus asked the previous owner how he had grown the business. "I sit around and wait for the phone to ring," he told her.

A decade later, Braus has expanded its market share across Washington and into Oregon. As a CEO and now the parent of two young children, Braus appreciates the predictability of what's largely a Monday-to-Friday desk job. "I'm not traveling all over the country," she said. "You know, I've got little kids. I'm at home with them. I like to go to the gym. I play in a soccer league."

Others have followed a similar path as investors. Tracy Britt Cool, another Harvard Business School alum and one of Warren Buffett's trusted lieutenants, left Berkshire in early 2020 to co-found an investment firm targeting midsize businesses with $5 million to $50 million in earnings. Her new firm, Kanbrick, sought solid but straightforward family or founder-owned businesses too small for Berkshire.

One of Britt Cool's first deals was a maker of boat covers in the Lake of the Ozarks called Marine Concepts. Another was a servicer of industrial calibration equipment in Louisiana. She's not worried about running out of investment opportunities because, she estimates, the nation is home to about 30,000 businesses with profits between $10 million and $50 million.

Millions of people have made fortunes in such ordinary, operational businesses selling everyday goods and services. In such ventures, something must physically move, or get fixed, served or installed. According to our analysis, of $31 trillion in total private business equity in the U.S., nearly half is in tactile, Main Street industries. Even among households worth $100 million or more, one third own businesses in tactile industries.

These businesses suggest that the economy is far from being swallowed by finance or technology, a concern that lately has evolved into fear that artificial intelligence will replace workers and further enrich those running the machines.

Consider A.B. Walters of Natchez, Miss., who left a career in computer science to pursue a more lucrative calling-manufacturing and installing seamless gutters. After installing gutters for Sears and growing frustrated with low product quality, he bought his first gutter machine in 1972 and founded the Senox Corp. It's now the largest supplier of seamless gutters in Texas, employs around 350 people and had around $50 million in sales in 2021, according to the National Establishment Time Series database.

Or take Arch "Beaver" Aplin III, who didn't set out to be a convenience store owner. As he told a crowd at Texas A&M in 2022, "I ended up where I was because I didn't have a job."

Aplin grew the small convenience store he opened in Lake Jackson, Texas, into Buc-ee's, a chain of gas and convenience megastores. Found along highways across Texas, in the South and as far west as Colorado, Buc-ee's travel centers are revered for their barbecue, bathrooms and beaver-themed paraphernalia.

Unlike the transformational innovation central to economic growth, the innovations of Everywhere Millionaires are often more incremental. Dick Portillo learned to steam buns by watching someone else do it. From that, he built a billion-dollar hot dog behemoth. His business grew because he sold a product that people wanted.