During the past 16 months, TIME'S Business section, headed by Senior Editor George M. Taber, has produced five cover-length examinations of the workings of the U.S. economy in general and some of its biggest companies in particular. The subjects: Wall Street, Chrysler, high-tech enterprises vs. "rust bowl" basic industries, IBM and AT&T. Running through all these stories has been a skein of numbers: units sold, market share, degree of dominance. For this week's cover story on the new multimillionaires, written by Associate Editor Alexander L. Taylor III, the numbers are more easily grasped than most. They have to do with numbers of dollars, which is to say money. Observes Taylor: "The approach is a vivid way of looking at the dynamic force of the U.S. economy. It was a lot of fun, and a little different from the usual business story, to see how our cover subjects made it so big and so fast, how they are spending it, and how it is changing them."

Taylor, who joined TIME four years ago, has previously been a finance and business reporter for the Detroit Free Press and the assistant news director for a Grand Rapids, Mich., TV station. These days, he is also a part-time university instructor, teaching a course at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism that deals with reporting as literature. He covers everything from Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year to works by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.

Those who reported this week's cover story found their subjects generally averse to the flamboyant display traditionally associated with new wealth. Says San Francisco Correspondent Michael Moritz, who also wrote the accompanying box on Venture Capitalist Arthur Rock, our cover figure: "I was impressed by Rock's silent power. People I talked to about him were reluctant to be critical, fearing his reach and influence." New York Correspondent Adam Zagorin was struck by the vitality of the multimillionaires he interviewed. "Stock Analyst Arnold Bernhard, for one, doubled his already considerable fortune when he was past 80," says Zagorin. "For such men, money is a byproduct of their creative drive, not of greed." Taylor agrees. "The people we are talking about," he says, "are far more interested in the companies they have built than in whether they are worth $5 million or $50 million. Given the vagaries of today's stock market, of course, that is probably a good thing."