Is this stat still up to date? It changes drastically between booms and recessions. In some years small businesses have had far more employees. A fact which should affect policymaking as much as the ratio at any given point.

Either way I'd expect fewer americans still work at large businesses than at small and mid-sized businesses combined.

Not by a big margin. Around 47% of the workforce is employed by small businesses.

So that's a minority.

And "small businesses" with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7% of all businesses and yet they represent less than half the total workforce.

The issue of course is that more regulation makes it that much harder for small business to hire and over time forces more and more of the economy and the labor force into the arms of big business.

That's 10s of millions of small companies hiring half the people. The point being there's plenty of people in America becoming "owners of the factory".

Your small companies hire up to 500 people which is nowhere small.

Also, it's not because a company is small that the owners are small time business people. The owners might be independently wealthy.

Why don't you look at the actual data: Firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent, and firms with fewer than 20 workers made up 89.0 percent. [1] The vast majority are small companies with single-digit employee counts. Add in independent contractors and it's even more skewed.

Being an entrepreneur means getting things done with what you have. You don't need to be wealth and instantly go from 0 to 1000 employees. Most people start with modest means and build up from there.

1. https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/

Wrong. 80,5% of all SMEs don't employ anyone (nonemployer firms).

So not only do most Americans do work for multinational companies (53%) but on top of that, 80,5% of the ones working in SMEs are themselves the owners and don't have any employees to speak of.

Which leaves a whopping 19.5% of American SMEs which actually employ workers.

So you're dead wrong.

cf: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...