The Week of May 4, 2026: Billionaires and the presumption of guilt, energy, tariffs, state capitalism, and much more.
The Week of May 4, 2026: Billionaires and the presumption of guilt, energy, tariffs, state capitalism, and much more.
The demonization of billionaires took another turn when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that they can only have become so rich through disreputable methods:
“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned…You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
She discussed the same topic on billionaire-owned X:
Someone can certainly *make* a billion dollars.
That’s not the same thing as earning. Growing fast and disrupting markets also often means chasing and wielding market power, political influence, and scale…
Her references to “chasing” market power are odd. Is it wrong to compete, which is what “chasing…market power” can mean? Or is it wrong to compete “too much?”
Political influence? Too many businesses, whether owned by billionaires or anyone else, are obliged or tempted to turn to the government for a break in return for who knows what. Tackle that by radically reducing the areas of economic activity in which government is involved. AOC will not do that, and neither will her more “transactional” colleagues on either side of the aisle. The bigger the government, the deeper the swamp.
But billionaires can’t have made their money cleanly? Really?
Economist (and more) Robert Reich doesn’t think so either. He argued recently that, inheritance apart, there are “basically” only four ways to become a billionaire: monopoly, fraud, insider trading, and political payoffs: “Don’t believe the self-made myth.”
“Basically” is doing a lot of work there. And so is “myth.”
Writing on NRO, Charlie Cooke:
Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, and LeBron James, to name a few — are in sports. Some, such as Steven Spielberg, Taylor Swift, and Jay-Z, are in entertainment. Many, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Palmer Luckey, are in business. All of those people “earned” their billion dollars and did so by providing something — athletics, movies, cars, music, technology — that people wanted to buy.
The U.S. has about 2.5 billionaires per million inhabitants. Sweden, that nest of greed and skullduggery, has about 4. Then there’s this news from Poland, which has (weird!) seen remarkable growth since shaking off communism:
The number of ultra-wealthy individuals in Poland has more than doubled over the last five years, a higher rate of growth than anywhere else in the world, according to a new study. Poland is also forecast to have the second-highest growth rate in the number of billionaires over the next five years.
Poland’s GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) has risen to 81 percent of the EU average, up from 44 percent twenty years ago. I await the complaints that this is despite its billionaires.
In 2004, economist William Nordhaus, later a Nobel prize winner, found that “only a minuscule fraction [2.2 percent] of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers.” The study covers an era that ended 25 years ago and would not have covered every billionaire, but it still makes a mockery of the way that billionaires are caricatured.
“Social returns” include cheaper and better goods and services. Referring to Jeff Bezos in a 2025 article for the Financial Times, AEI’s Michael Strain added convenience and variety, but didn’t confine himself to Amazon:
Even without taking philanthropy into account, billionaires make positive-sum contributions to overall welfare. Bill Gates and Michael Dell, for example, have made hundreds of millions of workers more productive by creating better software and computers, driving up their wages. Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionised email, internet search and mapping technology — many of us would eagerly shell out money every month for these services, if they weren’t provided by Google free of charge. Wall Street titans more efficiently allocate capital, which over time increases productivity and the wages of workers throughout the economy.
An unkind explanation of AOC’s view of billionaires is that she does not know what she’s talking about. A more charitable take is that her thinking is derived in some way from Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. To oversimplify, if a good or service is only worth the work (calculated according to certain principles) that was put into its production or supply. A billionaire’s billions would thus be prima facie evidence of exploitation.
The theory is nonsense, but its association with crazy Karl (a genius, I’m told) may have impressed AOC. Or perhaps belief is based on feels. A billion dollars is just “too much.” Instinctively or otherwise, the congresswoman may subscribe to ideas akin to the limitarianism advocated by the Belgo-Dutch philosopher Ingrid Robeyns, a high priestess of self-interested class warfare within the elite. Doing her bit for the professoriat, she argues that wealth should be capped at roughly $10 million a person, a creepily authoritarian notion explained in the previous Capital Letter.
Or maybe AOC is playing her part in ratcheting up an unpleasant but effective political strategy that has been gathering pace for years. Demonizing “the rich” works well. Demonizing billionaires works even better. Asserting that the latter’s fortunes must be tainted feeds nicely into that narrative. That the term “Epstein class” is now being fed into the propaganda mix even in cases when there is no obvious connection to that unlamented criminal is a twist with profoundly sinister implications.
Senator Warren isn’t content to attack a class. She goes after individuals, putting faces on the sinners. After all, it’s harder to whip up hate against abstraction:
If Jeff Bezos can drop $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala, he can afford to pay his fair share in taxes.
“Fair.”
Writing for Forbes last year, Phoebe Liu estimated that Bezos “likely paid $2.7 billion in taxes in 2024.”
Liu relates that, ahead of Bezos’s recent wedding, protestors unfurled a giant banner: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax,” a formula borrowed by Warren when she turned her attention to Bezos’s sponsorship of the Met Gala (a charitable donation, however grotesquely garish the event). When AOC had attended the gala a few years back, she tried to camouflage this act of lèse-égalité, to quote the New York Times, “dressed in a custom Brother Vellies ivory wool jacket dress with an organza flounce and the message ‘Tax the Rich’ emblazoned in red across her back.”
For chutzpah alone, she deserved a standing ovation. Not all agreed.
But back to the Bezos nuptials.
Liu (emphasis added):
“This isn’t just about one person—it’s about changing the rules so no billionaire can dodge responsibility, anywhere,” Clara Thompson, campaigner for environmental activist organization Greenpeace (which helped organize the protest), wrote in a press release. “The real issue is a broken system that lets billionaires skip out on their fair share of taxes while everyone else is left to foot the bill.”
It is almost as if there is a script. It is also another example of how greenery has merged within the wider leftist omnicause. In the U.K., the Greens are actively embracing “anti-Zionism,” but in Venice, Greenpeace was focused on tax policy.
Reason’s Robby Soave has looked more closely into Jeff Bezos’s potential tax liability:
Bezos’ wealth largely consists of the stock he owns in Amazon. When he cashes in shares of stock, he pays taxes. That’s how it works for everyone. It doesn’t make sense to tax people based on the theoretical value of the stock they own; that would mean taxing unrealized gains, i.e., the projected value of the asset before it’s sold. Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), a progressive and supporter of heavier taxation on billionaires, at one point understood that such a tax would discourage entrepreneurs from investing in their own companies and instead force them to sell off assets to private equity firms.
Yet taxing unrealized gains is on the class warriors’ agenda. This would not only discourage entrepreneurs from investing in their own companies, but, in the event of a hefty bill, it might also make it impossible. One consequence might be that the eccentric but brilliant ideas that have a way of springing out of the entrepreneurial mind might not spring very far if confronted with the (probably) institutional (probably) conventional investors to whom the entrepreneur has been forced to turn for cash.
In a 2022 Substack piece, AEI’s James Pethokoukis, drawing on work by University of Chicago economist Steven Kaplan, considered this question. Bezos came up.
From Kaplan:
Jeff Bezos was worth $4.7 billion or $5 billion in 2000. At the peak of the dotcom bubble, Amazon hadn’t really succeeded then. And if you imposed a 5 percent wealth tax on him when it was 5 billion, that’s a $250 million tax. By the time he would probably get around to paying it, which would be June [of 2000], his shares were worth 2.5 billion [due to the plunging stock market]. So now he’s got to sell. To get the 250 million — he would have to sell 10 percent of his shares. But then we [also] have a 50 percent capital gains tax. Got to sell 20 percent of [the] shares. So in six months, under this plan, he would have to sell 20 percent of Amazon in that situation. Which would probably – what would that do to the stock price? Probably drive it down further. So maybe 25 percent of Amazon. Do you want Jeff Bezos to be selling 25% of Amazon? In 2000?
Pethokoukis:
When PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002, Musk, the largest shareholder, walked away with $250 million before taxes, leaving him with $180 million after taxes. What did Musk do with that cash? Well, he didn’t buy some monstrous Bel-Air mansion or pricey Picasso painting.
Instead, he started SpaceX in 2002, putting in $100 million, and Tesla in 2003, putting in $80 million. Musk: “I thought the probability of success was so low that I provided all of the money. All of the money just came from me personally. I didn’t want to ask people, other investors for money if I thought we were going to die because I thought we were.”
No SpaceX, then? No Starlink?
Making it harder for hugely successful entrepreneurs to further build their businesses or launch new ventures makes no sense. It’s analogous to forcing the strongest players in a sports team to wear an outfit that will slow them down (hat tip, as so often, to Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron). The opportunity cost will be appalling. The economy will be weaker than it could have been, and America will be weaker than it could have been.
Geopolitical competition is also economic and technological. In China and Russia, countries with plenty of billionaires of their own, they will be cheering on the war against American billionaires. We can understand why Xi or Putin would do that, but why would U.S. politicians, in this respect, be on the same team?
As I observed in the most recent Capital Letter, some “leftist leaders may really believe they are working toward a fairer world: Millenarianism is a seductive psychosis,” but:
The spite and the jealousy displayed by wealth tax activists toward the “rich” is no less genuine for being strategically useful. They, one part of the elite (or would-be elite), see what another part has, and they crave it for themselves. They are enraged at the thought that they have been left behind by people they see as money-grubbing moral inferiors. Their egalitarianism is a tool to create a system in which they and their acolytes take the spoils.
That looks a lot like self-interest at the expense of others, the offense for which all billionaires are supposedly by definition guilty.
And as for fairness, Soave is not the first to wonder what will happen if someone pays taxes on unrealized gains in a stock, only for that position to become loss-making the following year. Would “the government pay back the money under such a scheme, or would an unrealized gains tax work in just one direction?” To Soave, this would be “obviously unworkable.” He is too optimistic. The tax would move in one direction. After all, investors can already be taxed on gains that, in real terms, inflation has turned into losses.
Soave wasn’t finished with fairness:
[T]he broader leftist notion—one made popular by Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.)—that the rich are paying less in taxes than everyone else is simply false. The U.S. tax code is extremely progressive: Lower-income people shoulder a significantly smaller tax burden than richer Americans. For federal income tax, the vast majority of revenue—upwards of 97 percent—is raised off the top half of income earners.
After demonization, dehumanization: The individual is replaced by a label, becoming, to borrow terminology adopted by the Bolsheviks, one of the “former people” (Бывшие люди). And former people, in the most literal sense, were what “former people” became.
The transformation of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (a name often forgotten), into a hero (for some) is a warning sign.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty, but the alleged contents of his diary do not seem to have disenchanted his fanbase.
“So say you want to rebel against the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel. Do you bomb the HQ? No. Bombs=terrorism,” Mangione wrote in August, the state court filing alleges. “Such actions appear the unjustified anger of someone who simply got sick/had bad luck and took their frustration out on the insurance industry, while recklessly endangering countless employees.”
Instead of carrying out a bombing, prosecutors allege, Mangione wrote in an entry in October that someone should “wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention.”
“Wack.”
A staged reading of Luigi: the Musical will be running in Manhattan next month.
From its publicity materials (emphasis added):
Luigi: the Musical doesn’t glorify violence, it interrogates it. Beneath the absurdity and punchlines lies a serious critique of how violence is packaged, sold, and consumed in American media. The show takes aim at a culture where brutality is both entertainment and spectacle, inviting audiences to laugh while also asking why we’re so quick to tune in when someone gets hurt. But it goes further, examining how violence is not just the act of individuals, but of elite institutions—like healthcare, Hollywood, and tech—through their neglect, indifference, and lack of accountability.
I have not seen this musical, which so far has only been performed in San Francisco and Edinburgh, but the highlighted section in that release comes very close to describing what Engels labeled “social murder,” a concept invoked by commentator Hasan Piker last month in The New York Times:
Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths.
Engels did indeed use that term in his Condition of the Working Class in England, but he pinned the guilt for such a murder on “society,” not an individual. His remedy was revolution, but in the interim, neither he nor Marx nor even the Lenin of the very early years of the twentieth century supported individual acts of terror against the oppressor, something Piker doesn’t mention.
After seeing his $238 million apartment in Manhattan singled out in a video made by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC, “What really upset me about the video was the fact that he put me in harm’s way. . . . You know, he seems to have forgotten that the CEO of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York.”
Griffin has not yet canceled plans for Citadel to be the anchor tenant in an office building planned for 350 Park Avenue, but he has warned that the company “will add far more jobs in Miami over the next decade as an immediate and direct consequence of the mayor’s poor decision… with respect to his posting of that video.”
Whatever 350 Park’s future, that’s likely to mean fewer jobs in New York City, many of them highly paid, unhelpful in a city where the top one percent of taxpayers accounts for about half of all the income tax paid.
Citadel executives contended that Griffin, along with the firm’s principals and team members, have paid nearly $2.3 billion in city and state taxes over the past five years.
And Griffin himself has directed $650 million in charitable gifts toward institutions ranging from the Robin Hood Foundation, Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Special Surgery, Success Academy charter schools, MoMA and more.
The private equity firm Apollo is also looking south. It is eyeing a second HQ in either Texas or Florida. It is there that its future expansion is likely to take place.
Meanwhile, Mangione merch is for sale online.
Mamdani has said we should have no billionaires. He has argued that “it is so much money in a moment of such inequality,” a verdict that might be aesthetic, ideological, or designed to fire up his supporters. It bears, however, little relation to economic logic. Billionaires possess a hefty share of the nation’s wealth, but so what?
From a purely utilitarian point of view, what should matter is whether the increase in the number of billionaires and their wealth has been at the expense of the rest of the population. The data suggest otherwise. Cities will not be enriched by scaring the billionaires away. Rather, their exodus will hurt the “working people” in whose name the richest are being taxed out of town. That won’t worry the architects of such policies. Omelet, eggs, you know how it goes.
Seattle’s socialist mayor, Katie Wilson, maintains that claims that the rich would leave the city because of a new millionaire’s tax have been exaggerated. But for those who do depart, her message was a smiling “bye”. That smug farewell was greeted by whoops and applause from an audience (gathered to talk about the “New Progressives” at Seattle University), presumably composed of the kind of people that the Wilsons and the Mamdanis want to use as their apparatchiks as they try to turn the cities they run into their power bases. Billionaires, millionaires, “the rich,” have the resources to argue back. They are in the way. No loss if they go. The cities they are quitting will be poorer, more dependent on government, and thus more malleable. That’s a win.
It’s the power, stupid.
Note: Ken Griffin is a supporter of National Review Institute.
The Capital Record: Sound & Vision
We released the latest in our series of podcasts, the Capital Record. Follow the link to see how to subscribe (it’s free!). The Capital Record, hosted by financier David L. Bahnsen, makes use of two formats to deliver Capital Matters’ defense of free markets. The original podcast continues, but if you want to watch David talk, please click on the YouTube link.
Two Bankruptcies for the Price of One? (Podcast/YouTube)
American capital markets are celebrated on this podcast — as they should be by anyone who values a free and virtuous society. Rule of law is a vital component to upholding the effect strong capital markets have on our economy. The DOJ blocking of a JetBlue acquisition of Spirit Airlines did not avoid two bankruptcies — it created one. And on today’s podcast, we prove it.
Asymmetric Advantages for Human Flourishing (Podcast/YouTube)
David is joined by U.S. energy industry legend and pioneer, Charif Souki. Hear not only his incredible story as a leading force in the shale revolution but also get the lay of the land in one of the great stories of our time: U.S. energy dominance. All at once, this episode will remind you of the role robust capital markets play in the cause of free enterprise and reiterate the most important business principles.
The Capital Matters week that was…
Transportation
A thriving freight-rail system is critical to our nation’s economic health. Railroads ship massive amounts of goods and commodities over 140,000 miles in a cost-efficient, safe, and environmentally friendly way. If state and local governments were allowed to regulate the system without restraint, the volume of rules would make interstate operations difficult, if not impossible. To prevent such a regulatory nightmare, Congress sought to create a comprehensive regulatory framework for our freight-rail system — although the courts have largely abandoned the meaning of the legislation.
Energy
That’s in line with warnings from Fatih Birol, the head of the (sometimes annoying) International Agency (IEA) six weeks ago. He is now referring to “the largest energy crisis we have ever faced.” The crunch is already well underway in aviation fuel (the rise in its price was a contributory factor in the final collapse of Spirit Airlines, although that airline’s demise has been in the cards for some time). Worries about supply and/or price are already causing some flight cancellations and price hikes on both sides of the Atlantic, although the number of cancellations remains modest for now. According to a separate FT report, the total number of seats available on all airlines during May has fallen from 132m to 130m between mid- and late April.
While many Americans have watched energy prices rise with trepidation amid President Trump’s war on Iran, the residents of one state, Alaska, have done so with anticipation…
Climate Policy
There is still much debate over whether banning advertisements for tobacco products on television and radio had the intended effect of ensuring that fewer people smoked. Some studies say it did. Others disagree. But what every side of this debate concedes is that tobacco consumption is a luxury habit. That lends some superficial credence to the admittedly patronizing notion that fewer people might use these products if they weren’t regularly reminded of their existence.
The city of Amsterdam is trying a different approach. It, too, is getting into the advertisement-banning game. But the banned ads aren’t for discretionary products. Rather, they are necessities, albeit the sort that irritate the environmentalist left…
As is becoming all too obvious, Europe is on the edge of an oil crisis. And so (via the Daily Telegraph) this, a few days ago, is what Ed Miliband, the millenarian fanatic now acting as Britain’s secretary of state for Energy Security and Net Zero (choose one), had to say about BP…
The U.K. continues its pointless and self-destructive pursuit of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. These policies will make no difference to the climate, but both Labour and Conservative governments have justified them, in part, on the grounds that the rest of the world would be impressed by the example that Britain is setting…
Spirit Airlines
What fun it must be to play poisoner and physician.
In 2024, after the Biden administration successfully blocked a merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, Senator Elizabeth Warren was elated. “This,” she tweeted out excitedly, “is a Biden win for flyers!”
Student Loans
The federal student-loan program looks more than ever like a handout, not a genuine extension of credit that is expected to be repaid…
The Economy
Most indicators suggest that Americans were prepared to pare back their discretionary spending in advance of what they expect will be hard times to come. So far, however, those indicators have not given way to the kind of belt-tightening one might expect…
Tariffs
There are many reasons why Donald Trump and Republicans have had persistently low approval ratings since last spring — which have translated into defeats in 2025 and in many special elections — and now face a potentially grisly midterm election season. The most obvious cause is voter discontent at the cost of living. There’s a harsh irony here, because the proponents of raising tariffs have made exactly the same mistake they once claimed adherents of the pre-Trump Republican economic orthodoxy made…
The United States Court of International Trade (CIT), in a 2–1 ruling, has invalidated the tariffs President Trump imposed in purported reliance on Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. The president imposed the tariffs — basically, 10 percent across the board, with various exceptions — after excoriating the Supreme Court for invalidating the tariffs he capriciously imposed and amended in purported reliance on the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. (See Learning Resources v. Trump [February 20, 2026] and NR’s editorial.)…
Billionaires
John Steinbeck once lamented that, even during the 1930s, Americans were “not very interested in socialism.” “The trouble,” Steinbeck said, “was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians; everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” Well, I think that is marvelous. There are all manner of profound economic problems with the anti-billionaire sentiments in which figures such as Ocasio-Cortez like to trade, but just as alarming is what such ideas would do culturally if they were to be adopted into the American mainstream…
The Fed
There is a renewed constitutional debate today over the legitimacy of federal entities designed by Congress to be insulated from political control, sparked by President Trump’s pursuit of unified executive power. One case currently before the Supreme Court, Trump v. Slaughter, questions the constitutionality of “independent agencies” whose leaders the president is restricted by statute from removing. Trump argues that such restrictions violate the separation of powers by denying the president full control of the branch he is tasked with leading…
State Capitalism
Conservatives warned last year when the government took a 10 percent stake in Intel that the Trump administration — free of any free-market pretensions — would seek to systematically advantage the chipmaker. Having the state on your side is a great way for companies to get ahead, as it can throw its coercive weight around on your behalf…
Defense
Warfare tends to accelerate technological advance, and the war in Ukraine is proving no exception in that respect. In January, I noted a report of one Ukrainian robot armed with a heavy machine gun holding off repeated Russian attacks for 45 days. It had done so alone, with no Ukrainian soldiers on site, an example of how, in response to the peril posed by Russian drones and its own lack of numbers, Ukraine is pioneering the development and deployment of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs)…
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