Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America

by Bridget Read Narrated by Nikki Massoud

Overview

A “gripping” (The Washington Post) work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society.

“Reads like a thriller . . . masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business.”-The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world's greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM. They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and-most precious of all-financial freedom. If, that is, you're willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes. Yet the industry's origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers-anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality.

In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today's top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net, then profiting from the chaos. Along the way, Read delves into the stories of those devastated by the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn.

A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism's stealthiest PR campaign, a cunning grift that has shaped nearly everything about how we live, and whose ultimate target is democracy itself.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

[A] deeply reported thrill ride–slash–horror story. This book is fascinating. And scary as hell.”—Vulture

“Gripping and instructive. . . . Lucid and engaging . . . . [Bridget Read] sketches a vivid portrait of a cultish culture.”—The Washington Post

“Engaging. . . . Read names the leaders who benefit [from MLM], and in doing so, she delivers a damning portrait of those who take advantage—and she humanizes the people they rip off. Investigating an industry notorious for doublespeak and euphemism, she calls things what they are.”—The Atlantic

“Fascinating. . . . Read upends everything we thought we knew about multilevel marketing. . . . It may be nonfiction, but Little Bosses Everywhere reads like a work of narrative fiction.”—Katie Couric Media

“Thorough. . . . Read’s book is a huge addition to the mix [of MLM coverage], expertly and carefully walking readers through the history of MLMs and revealing them for what they really are.”—The New Republic

“Crucially—and what sets Little Bosses Everywhere apart from the myriad individual company exposés in print and film over the past few years—Read tells the whole story of the industry, digging into its origins to explain how it morphed into what it is today.”—The A.V. Club

“Comprehensive, engaging, and truly illuminating.”—Literary Hub

“Utterly engrossing. . . . Little Bosses Everywhere is a dark tale of warped capitalism and dashed dreams.”—Air Mail

“Superb.”—The American Prospect

“Compelling. . . . Read’s well-reported, entertaining history—of a bluntly predatory business model built on the promise of self-driven social mobility that materializes for only an elite few—is a parable about the United States.”—Bookforum

“Little Bosses Everywhere is an endlessly entertaining and eye-opening exploration of the dark side of the American dream. Before spending a dime on anything else, read this to understand the most seductive and corrosive aspects of our get-rich-quick culture.”—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road

“Grounded in history and a biting structural critique of country and capitalism, Little Bosses Everywhere is enraging and elucidating; it’s also a terrific and entertaining story. This is an important book.”—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad

“A lively, thorough investigation of the alarmingly American multilevel marketing industrial complex, from sketchy juice shops all the way to the White House.”—Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto

“You’ve surely wondered how in the hell Donald Trump’s MAGA movement managed to take power in the United States. Incredibly valuable and grimly entertaining, Little Bosses Everywhere will make you wonder how it managed to take so long.”—Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland

“Little Bosses Everywhere not only reveals the predatory nature of multilevel marketing for those swept up into its deceptive schemes, but by tracing the industry’s political influence over the last several decades, it also raises the specter that the nation itself is now being made over into a giant pyramid scheme.”—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne

“A penetrating exposé of multilevel marketing schemes . . . . The perceptive analysis illuminates how MLM constitutes an unholy alliance of grift and the American bootstrapping ethos. . . . Readers will be rapt.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Thoroughly reported. . . . An impressive investigative work . . . . Bolstered by revealing interviews with people burned by MLMs and a touch of the madcap.”—Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2025-03-04
A durable, controversial business model pays off for just a few.

There are about 700 multilevel marketing companies in the U.S., among them biggies like Amway, Herbalife, and Mary Kay, Read writes in this impressive investigative work. MLMs claim billions in annual sales, yet independent analyses show that most people who try to make a buck in the industry earn almost nothing. That’s because “participants are not employees” but so-called distributors or partners, contractors who must first buy the cosmetics, weight-loss plans, or vitamins they hope to sell. Read’s book spans nine decades, from MLM pioneer Carl F. Rehnborg, a vitamin salesman who falsely professed to be a doctor, to the industry’s current status as a political force. Amway’s co-founder and his wife gave $1 billion to Republican causes, and, inevitably, Donald Trump became an industry player. TheNew York magazine writer’s narrative is bolstered by revealing interviews with people burned by MLMs—one spent $75,000 on cosmetics, earning back a fraction on sales—and a touch of the madcap; she sneaks into a Mary Kay convention, where awards are given to “consultants” who bought $10,000 worth of products to sell. While paying close attention to the court cases and media exposés that attempted, often in vain, to distinguish between “predatory” but legal multilevel businesses and fraudulent pyramid schemes, Read notes that recent developments in the nation’s capital have signaled to some insiders that MLMs were working in “a postregulatory world.” Today, the battle to define what’s ethical has moved online, where “anti-MLMers” call for reform and proponents recruit on social media. In her thoroughly reported book, Read includes some levity, noting that in the 1970s, reps for Amway, founded by conservative Christians, circulated a rumor that a competitor “was run by Satanists.”

Scrutinizing an industry whose self-generated hype belies the experiences of many.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940190866070
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

A Quintessential American Attitude

Sitting on a bench under a tree in an office park in Buena Park, California, is a life-size bronze statue of an elderly man gazing out in contemplation. The same statue sits in a large corporate building in Beijing, China, in front of a rolltop desk covered in test tubes. The man also has an endowed professorship in his name at Stanford University’s Disease Prevention Research Center in Palo Alto, to “perpetuate his memory and ideals.” This is Carl F. Rehnborg, the grandfather of multi-level marketing.

Should a curious person want to know who invented MLM, a quick Google search will lead to Rehnborg, and to his accolades and institutional bona fides, including the statues and the endowed professorship. According to Stanford’s website, Rehnborg was a pioneering humanitarian who, in 1934, invented “what is believed to be the first multivitamin/multimineral dietary supplement marketed in the United States.” Rehnborg was inspired by time he spent in China observing wide-spread malnutrition, the website says. The vitamin supplement company he founded, Nutrilite, was also the first-ever company to use the multilevel marketing method—though Stanford doesn’t mention this accomplishment.

The Amway Corporation does, however, in a section of its own website called “Amway’s Impact on Direct Selling”: “To help distribute his Nutrilite line,” it says, “Rehnborg and his team were among the first to develop a compensation model for direct sellers sometimes called multi-level marketing.” Nutrilite eventually became part of Amway, which is why much of Rehnborg’s memory is kept alive by the company. It was Amway that endowed the Stanford professorship in 1989. Amway also commissioned the statues of Rehnborg, one in a building called the Amway Experience Center in Beijing, and the other in front of the clean, bright Nutrilite headquarters in Buena Park, called the Center for Optimal Health, which doubles as a small museum. Visitors can walk inside the metal hut where Rehnborg lived and filled his vitamins by hand when Nutrilite was in its infancy. Amway’s Independent Business Owners, the company’s name for its recruits, come from all over the world to visit the center and take pictures with the Rehnborg statue, putting their arms around its bronze neck.

Rehnborg begat Nutrilite, Nutrilite begat Amway, and the rest is history—that’s the official creation story of multilevel marketing, as told in the spotless halls of the Nutrilite Center for Optimal Health. Start to dig into it, however, and the whole thing comes to resemble a gleaming Potemkin village. Despite what the statues and the endowment might imply, despite black-and-white photographs of Rehnborg in a lab coat, and the many times he called himself doctor, Rehnborg wasn’t a scientist, a doctor, or even a researcher when he started his vitamin company. He was a salesman.

Before he aspired to end malnutrition, Carl Rehnborg aspired to be rich. His parents were Swedish immigrant artisans who sold paintings and jewelry to vacationers up and down the East Coast, in places like St. Augustine and Savannah, where, at the tail end of the nineteenth century, America’s industrialists spent their millions. Carl, born in 1887, was the oldest of five siblings, three boys and two girls, and the whole family moved with the seasons. A winter spent in Pinehurst, North Carolina, the world’s first golf resort, left a huge impression on the nineteen-year-old Rehnborg in 1906, according to The Nutrilite Story, a 424-page tome published by the Amway Corporation in 2009. The Nutrilite Story, written by Rehnborg’s son, Carl Samuel “Sam” Rehnborg, Jr., who worked for his father and eventually for Amway, is the most robust—and only—public collection of primary sources on Rehnborg, the founding of Nutrilite, and the invention of MLM. It also functions as an extended Amway brochure, establishing Rehnborg as a brilliant autodidact with a genius IQ and multilevel marketing as a world-historical innovation on par with the advent of the internet.

Rehnborg’s trip to Pinehurst reportedly offered him a chance to hobnob among the leisure class, the du Ponts, Morgans, and Mellons, while he was “actively nurturing a dashing persona.” Sam Rehnborg writes that his father held a “quintessential American attitude”: he believed that “it took tenacity, intelligence, and hard work to make things happen rather than mere wealth.”

Though he was born in the Gilded Age, Rehnborg did not strike it rich the first time he tried, nor the second, nor the third as he made his way in the world. He had trouble committing to a trade, starting with selling jewelry for his parents, at which he failed. He moved to New York to become an actor, but instead he settled at the Pratt Institute to study in their jewelry design program, then dropped out—though, luckily for him, not before he met Hester Hawkes, a fellow Pratt student and Cape Cod heiress, who he eventually married in 1917. After that he was a streetcar conductor and a newspaper copy editor. At one point he invented a “revolutionary flooring material” that cracked in its first demonstration. He took a trip to Seattle in an attempt to join the Alaskan Gold Rush, but he arrived a few years too late. The gold was gone.

What Rehnborg lacked in consistency and follow-through, he seems to have made up for in charm and confidence. The Rehnborg boys were tall and good-looking, one family acquaintance said, and Carl in particular “knew what he wanted and went after it.” From an early age, his son chronicles, Rehnborg was a keen observer of people and a smooth talker—particularly with women. As a nineteen-year-old, he had written out a series of astute “rules” in his diary about how to court members of the opposite sex, which included number 5 (“Dance a few extra steps and seem loath to let her go”) and number 22 (“Carry yourself with confidence but not over-assurance, remember at the same time that everything is your fault”).

In 1915, at twenty-eight, Rehnborg accepted a job as an accountant with the Standard Oil Company of New York in Tianjin, then Tientsin, China. Being an American in China, even as a mere accountant, finally afforded him a taste of the tycoon’s lifestyle he had been dreaming about back home. He was assigned a house-boy, who laid out his white pongee suit and pith helmet every morning; he and Hester lived in the stately French concession of Tientsin, which was designed to look like Paris. The country had recently been opened up to foreign investment, and Rehnborg was surrounded by tales of wealthy men who had made their fortunes in the East, including his own boss at Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, already one of the richest men in the United States.

Rehnborg’s time in China is where multilevel marketing’s foundational lore begins. As The Nutrilite Story tells it, Rehnborg became interested in the subject of nutrition when he observed the ill health of poor Chinese people while traveling around the country for Standard Oil. This is what kicked off Rehnborg’s “quest to create supplements,” per an Amway website page called “The Origins of Nutrilite: A Brand Ahead of Its Time.”

Rehnborg’s initial trip to China lasted less than a year. He then took short-lived jobs in Mexico and Texas before coming down with the Spanish flu in 1918. While convalescing in a hospital, according to The Nutrilite Story, he came up with a brilliant plan for his first nutrition-based venture: bringing milk to the people of China. The Carnation Milk Company had already been established in the United States and Rehnborg decided the Chinese were an untapped market. After pitching his idea successfully to Carnation in New York, he returned to China and set up an agency in Shanghai.

Rehnborg, however, didn’t account for the fact that Chinese people are largely lactose intolerant. His potential Chinese customers not only disliked the taste of the Carnation milk; it made them sick. The business struggled to get off the ground, and eventually Rehnborg had to give it up entirely. In 1924, he pivoted again: If he couldn’t sell milk to the Chinese, he could sell them toothpaste and other goods, as a salesman for Colgate.

But that wouldn’t make him rich either. By 1927, the Chinese Civil War had begun, upending Rehnborg’s selling network. The international settlement in Shanghai where his family lived was essentially under siege for a time, with foreigners unable to leave the compound. This experience is another important chapter in Rehnborg’s vision quest, as told by his son: He had unwittingly been preparing for his time in captivity as a kind of extreme nutrition hobbyist. Sam Rehnborg writes that his father had long been experimenting on his wife and children by adding yeast to their cereal, concocting a “beverage made from infusions of rusty nails” for iron, and dusting food with powdered shells. He allegedly spread these tips to his fellow compatriots languishing in the settlement, as they tried to stave off scurvy. Eventually a truce was called, but the war had irreparably damaged his business. His wife, Hester, left him, and Rehnborg was so broke that Carnation, his old employer, had to pay for his trip home. His adventure abroad was over.

Videos