Yes I think that's extremely normal. And that's exactly what the paper talks about - self-employed = pass-through income. If you're a lawyer or consultant and

Yes I think that's extremely normal. And that's exactly what the paper talks about - self-employed = pass-through income. If you're a lawyer or consultant and you bill your clients through your 1-person LLC (extremely common), your income is pass-through income and the paper would conclude that you are a "top earner" whose income comes from owning a business. On the doctor side, it's quite common for specialists to be technically self-employed and bill hospitals for their time rather than being a true FTE. See the issue with using the abstract comments here? Also important to note is that the paper isn't looking at individual earners, it's looking at households (it bases its information on tax filings, most of which for 1%+ people would be joint filings). If you and your wife each make $220k in total compensation (relatively easy in the Bay Area or NYC for example), congratulations, the paper says you're a 1% earner. Back to my main point - if you want to talk about business owners in the job-creating sense vs. income, it's important to distinguish between 1% and 0.1%. The latter is composed mostly of medium-size business owners (a good thing!), but the former is not.