Political Economy

No Country Mints Millionaires Like America — Just Ask Its Socialists

More than 1,200 Americans crossed the seven-figure line every day last year. Some of the loudest critics of the system that made it possible are among them.

By Michael T. Ruhlman | Contributing Editor | WFPX News | October 2026

In restructuring work, you learn quickly that a balance sheet has no politics. It does not care what the owner believes about markets. It only records what happened. And what happened in 2025, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, is that the United States added more than 440,000 new dollar millionaires in a single year, roughly 1,200 every day, accounting for almost half of the nearly one million created worldwide.

No other country came close. The United Kingdom, in second place, added about 43,000. Germany added about 41,000. America now counts some 23.6 million millionaires, more than four times mainland China’s 5.3 million. If you want to make your first million anywhere on Earth, the odds, the paths and the sheer volume all point to one address.

The most persuasive witnesses to that fact are not Wall Street bankers. They are the people who spend their careers telling us the system is rigged.

The Ledger Doesn’t Care About Your Politics

Consider Senator Bernie Sanders. For most of his career he was a modestly paid public official. Then came the 2016 campaign, a national following, and a string of bestselling books. Forbes has tallied roughly $2.5 million in publishing income between 2011 and 2023, with royalties peaking near $880,000 in 2017 alone. Estimates now put his net worth around $3 million, with homes in Burlington and Washington and, for a time, a third on a Vermont lake. Asked about it, he gave the most capitalist answer imaginable.

“If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders, to The New York Times

He is right. That sentence is the American proposition in miniature: create something people will pay for, and the market will pay you for it, regardless of whether you approve of the market.

Senator Elizabeth Warren took an even more ordinary road. A law professor whose specialty was, fittingly, bankruptcy, she built her wealth through a Harvard salary, book advances, and her husband’s academic career. Her 2019 Senate disclosure placed the couple’s net worth somewhere between $4.8 million and $11 million, held largely in plain mutual funds. Forbes has estimated about $12 million. No stock options, no hedge fund. Just two professional incomes, steady saving and compounding in American capital markets, which is precisely the path open to millions of teachers, nurses and engineers.

Then there is Hasan Piker, the democratic-socialist Twitch streamer born in New Jersey in 1991. He began streaming in 2018. When Twitch’s internal payout data leaked in 2021, it showed he had been paid about $2.8 million since 2019, roughly a million dollars a year, from a platform owned by Amazon. That same year he bought a West Hollywood home for $2.74 million. Net-worth trackers estimate his fortune around $8 million, though such figures are unverified. His business did not exist a generation ago. It exists because an open American market for attention, advertising and subscriptions lets a young man with a camera and opinions build a seven-figure enterprise from his living room.

The Mayor Who Isn’t There Yet

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani belongs in this conversation for the opposite reason: he is not a millionaire, and fairness requires saying so. His disclosures show a net worth of roughly $200,000, most of it a parcel of land in Uganda valued between $150,000 and $250,000. As an assemblyman he rented a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens.

But look at his position through a workout analyst’s eyes. He now earns about $258,000 a year as mayor and has the option of living rent-free in Gracie Mansion. He governs a city that, by one count, is home to nearly 350,000 millionaires. On that income, with no housing cost, disciplined saving and ordinary market returns would put the first million within reach inside a decade. The same arithmetic, on a smaller scale and a longer timeline, is available to a union electrician in Queens who maxes out his retirement plan. Mr. Mamdani’s own city is the proof of concept for the system he hopes to reform.

Why Here and Not Elsewhere

The American advantage is not luck. It is structural. The United States has the deepest capital markets in the world, broad access to tax-advantaged retirement accounts, and some of the lowest barriers on Earth to starting a business. It hosts the platforms, from Amazon and YouTube to Twitch and Substack, on which new kinds of fortunes are built. And, a point too often overlooked, it has a bankruptcy code that lets people fail and try again. I spent years inside the workouts of Eastern Airlines, the Trump Shuttle and S&L-era real estate. Chapter 11 is not a moral failure. It is a recycling system for capital and ambition, and few countries offer anything as forgiving.

Most American millionaires are also self-made. A Ramsey Solutions study of more than 10,000 U.S. millionaires found that roughly eight in ten received no inheritance at all. They got there the Warren way: steady careers, consistent investing, and time.

What the Critics Get Right

An honest workout requires reading the whole ledger, and the case has real limits. Measured per person rather than in total, America is not the densest millionaire nation. UBS finds that in Luxembourg and Switzerland more than one adult in eight is a millionaire, and Switzerland tops the world in average wealth per adult, with the United States second. Critics also point out that much of 2025’s gain came from rising stock prices, which reward those who already own assets. UBS itself notes that median wealth declined in most countries since 2020, even as the number of millionaires climbed, a sign that averages can rise while the typical household stands still.

Those are fair points, and they deserve serious answers on housing costs, access to ownership and the path into the investor class. But they describe the challenge of widening the ladder, not evidence that the ladder is missing. By volume, by variety of paths and by the speed at which newcomers can climb, no economy on Earth produces first-time millionaires like this one.

The Ruhlman Thought: The surest testimony to a system is not what its defenders claim but what its critics achieve within it. A seed planted in good soil multiplies, whether or not the farmer approves of the field.