Here's a tale of two over-the-top weddings -- one familiar, the other probably not.

The first was Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's black-tie, star-studded (the usual Kardashians, DiCaprio, and Gates crowd) extravaganza in Venice last year. The festivities, which essentially took over the city and sparked protests, included a Gatsby-themed party. Cost: an estimated $50 million.

The second wedding was a five-day celebration in Paris two years early, which included a rehearsal dinner at the Paris Opera House, fireworks at the Eiffel Tower, and a party under the Arc de Triomphe. There was also a night at the Palace of Versailles, leased entirely for the soiree, where guests dined in the style of the lost monarchy, served by waiters dressed in period costume. Adam Levine of Maroon Five performed "She Will Be Loved" for the couple's first dance. Cost: upward of $60 million.

Eye roll alert. Must be another Silicon Valley or Wall Street arriviste, right? Wrong. As it turns out, the second wedding was thrown by Robert and Paula Brockway of Coral Gables, Fla., for their daughter Madelaine. The Brockways are car dealers.

The anecdote of the Brockway's 'Wedding of the Century" (though not the groom's legal travails) comes from The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, a new book by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, Princeton University and University of Chicago economists, respectively. The Brockway nuptials illustrate the fact that the great majority of rich people in America aren't rubbing shoulders with Sand Hill Road venture capitalists or subordinating debentures. They got rich running their own businesses, be it a string of Ford dealerships, a medical office, or as The Wall Street Journal reported recently, a restaurant-supply business.

"Celebrity billionaires monopolize all the attention," Zidar tells me from his office in Princeton, N.J. "Yes, there are very rich people, like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But if you add up all of their wealth, it's an order of magnitude smaller than millionaires who own private businesses."

As of 2022, the authors say, there were three million such millionaires -- people with $5 million or more who own a private business -- worth $54.8 trillion. That same year, the entire Forbes 400 was worth only $4 trillion. (Both numbers have doubtless spiked since then.) Small wonder that the American consumer, particularly on the high end, is still going great guns.

Zidar calls them Everywhere Millionaires because they aren't clustered in Manhattan or Menlo Park, Calif. "There are rich people all across America," he says. "I used to go to a lake in the Ozarks, and people had $100,000 boats left and right. Those are the people we're talking about."

Intuitively, none of this is particularly earth-shattering, but before the professors' work, no one had quantified this phenomenon. That, says Zidar, is another reason why we focus on the big company CEOs. "Those companies report CEO pay; private business owners don't," he says.

Key to the rise of the Everywhere Millionaire class (and to the book) has been the proliferation over the past 40 years of "pass through" businesses (mentioned 165 times in the text). Pass-throughs don't pay corporate taxes. Instead, any profits pass through to their owners' individual income taxes. In recent decades, lower tax rates for pass-throughs have driven business owners to adopt them.

The Treasury Department hired Zidar and Zwick in 2014, fresh out of graduate school (they lived in an apartment owned by an artist who decorated with exhibits of Peeps, the Easter candy), to help figure out how much business owners were paying in taxes. "That data proved a gold mine," they write. "With it, we discovered a hidden world of rich business owners....We could fill out the full map of American enterprise...and see who owned what, how much they earned, where they lived, and how they built their fortunes."

A recent look at the Bloomberg Billionaire list shows a cluster of seven Anthropic execs (including the Amodei siblings, Dario and Daniela), each worth $7.98 billion. Right below, at $7.91 billion, is Johnny Morris, founder of Bass Pro Shops. Hard to believe in this day and age, but it's Morris who's more typical, not the Amodeis.