Being low status but high income

Being low status but high income is the most underrated way to get rich in 2026. This article essentially making this point was the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week. It argues that the next wave of $10 million fortunes won't be built by elite school grads, big corporate execs or Silicon Valley founders, but by a type of rich person most people have never heard of. While I agree that this is the new American Dream, I think the article's version of how you get there is outdated. So this type of rich person is the everywhere millionaire. People who built large fortunes to ordinary goods and services businesses, like a hotdog chain that sold for a billion, convenience stores, car dealerships, HVAC companies, as someone who went to two Ivy League schools and started my career in investment banking. I was raised to believe that the most stable, respectable path for smart ambitious people to get rich is climbing the corporate ladder. High status and high income. But now, even the most corporate Wall Street Journal is now saying the conventional ladder of studying hard, going to a top college and landing a good job seems further out of reach. 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. 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. You might read all of this and think, great, let me go start or buy a small business. You definitely can. Millions of boomer businesses will need successor soon and SBA loans make buying a business more accessible than ever. But the article profiles millionaires built over decades, not necessarily the best way to start today. Opening a restaurant today, for example, costs a lot more than it did before. The $1,000 used to open a hot dog stand in 1968 is about $12,000 now. Buying a good business has also become mainstream among people in business, finance and tech. I have friends from business school who have searched for two years without finding a business worth buying. Instead, the bigger lesson is to find overlooked ways to own cash flowing businesses, especially if they feel those status now. It could be a niche service, paid newsletter, fractional practice, a small software product. Follow me to learn about more of these, but by the time someone from Harvard wants to do it, the arbitrage is already disappearing.