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As a land passionately devoted to free enterprise, the U.S. has always been the best place for a man to make his million. Throughout its history—from the days of the earliest Virginia planters to the postwar bloom of electronics millionaires—the drive for fortune has been a shaping influence and a productive force. The fabled 19th century millionaires—John D. Rockefeller, Edward H. Harriman and Andrew Carnegie—all began poor. Despite their often controversial actions, they, like most American millionaires, basically enriched themselves by enriching a growing nation.
Lately, the belief has grown that it is no longer possible to become a millionaire, that debilitating taxes, savage competition from big corporations and the sating of consumer appetites have slammed the door to great wealth. Wrong on all counts. The U.S. still offers countless opportunities for the man who wants to accumulate a personal net worth of $1,000,000 or more—and thousands seize them every year. The number of U.S. millionaires, reports the Federal Reserve Board, has swelled from 40,000 in 1958 to nearly 100,000 at present. How do they do it? In a variety of individual ways, but their common denominator is that they find an economic need and fill it.
Insatiable Craving. Today's prospering capitalism creates enormous needs and endless challenges. Economically and socially, the U.S. is the world's most mobile nation: capital flows freely from lenders to borrowers, workers shift from job to job, and venturesome entrepreneurs jump quickly up the economic ladder. The changing trends of business, science and demography provide the risktaker with ever fresh chances. Technology's quantum leaps are opening new industries almost every year—transistors, computers, lasers, masers, color TV. The shift of the economy's vast weight from traditional heavy manufacturing into the growth area of services is producing limitless openings for men with ideas. So is the movement of the population: young marrieds are going out to the suburbs, oldsters are coming back to the cities, Negroes are moving North.
As the population grows and shifts, its wants speed ahead. Americans have an insatiable craving for improved goods and services, more eagerly embrace new products than any other people. Their willingness to buy almost anything that will amuse, uplift, beautify or offer convenience is demonstrated by the marketplace successes of such things as textured stockings, the electric carving knife, skate boards, diet cola, shoe-shining machines and speed-reading courses. Getting backers for a sound idea is no real problem; credit is cheaper (average interest rate: 5%) and bankers more eager to lend in the U.S. than in any other major nation.
Compulsively Driven. In this dynamic and changing environment, the new millionaires are quite unlike anything the nation has ever seen. Compared with the gilded-age millionaires of a century ago, they are harder-working, less flamboyant and more anonymous. They have not made their fortunes in steel, oil, railroads and the other basic industries, but in the frontier technologies, the newest services and even the arts. They are an uncommonly talented lot: bright but not brilliant, pragmatic, somewhat egotistical, compulsively driven to achievement.