“It can be super mundane things like shoveling snow at an airport, selling concessions at a hockey stadium. … It could be storing paper. It could be fixing garage doors. Recently, someone just sold a garage door servicing business for $2 billion.”
Prof G Media · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
The economist describes the private business owners who make up much of America's wealthy class. He opens with a man who started with a $1,000 hot dog trailer and decades later sold the business for a billion dollars.
Transcript
…that we don't hear that often in today's conversation about income and opportunity. And we're not saying that all is well and everything is fair and you have an equal shot no matter where you're born. That's definitely not borne out in the data. But it's not all gloom and doom there in the data.
What are some of these businesses? Like what are some examples of a business that's run by an everywhere millionaire?
…of wealth in America. And there's a lot of different niches in the economy. Not all of them become billionaires, but many of them have hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars. And it can be super mundane things like shoveling snow at an airport, selling concessions at a hockey stadium. If you have a big contract for selling concessions, you're going to make a lot of money. It could be storing paper. It could be fixing garage doors. Recently, someone just sold a garage door servicing business for $2 billion. And there's just a lot of these that fly under the radar, but are really important for your understanding how you actually get rich and what's the blueprint for doing it in America today.
You also point out that our tax code has been structured to really benefit these kinds of companies. You talk about pass-through businesses. What are pass-through businesses and how does our tax code relate to the success of some of these people, Eric?
Yeah, so pass-through businesses, unlike traditional corporations. So if you look at the stock market, these are public companies. They're traditional corporations or subchapter C corporations for the internal revenue code category that taxes them. They pay tax at the firm level, and then the…
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