'I don't think we should have billionaires': Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words

[duckworth969]

My sentiments exactly.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/01/mamdani-own-words-quotes

[Donkees]

1. Bernie Sanders: "billionaires shouldn't exist".

[murielm99]

2. He does not come from a billionaire family,

but they are still quite wealthy.

[Omnipresent]

3. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

There should be no denying it.
Some of us only remember there being millionaires, because there never was a higher class of wealth.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. Depends How They Earned Their Wealth

[sheshe2]

5. And what you do with it. nt

[PCB66]

8. There are three kinds of rich

Those who earned the money

Those who inherited it

Those who stole it

I read one time that the list of the top one percent of wealth in the US changes by about a third every year.

In the same article it mentioned that the group mostly likely to lose their wealth are the ones that inherited it.

[Clouds Passing]

6. I agree

[PCB66]

7. I personally have no problem with billionaires

For instance, I don't like Bill Gates as a person but he created products that I use and have greatly enhanced productivity not only in the US but all over the world.

Microsoft employ tens of thousands of well paid employees. The corporation pays hundreds of millions in taxes. Gates gives tens of millions each year in charity.

The same can be said said about Jeff Bezos. Don't like him but he created a service that I use all the time. Thousands of employees. Millions in taxes, etc.

There are exceptions Like Musk this year but billionaires have mostly supported Democrats.

The question is would these businesses have been created and grown without the incentive of big bucks.

I don't know if we will ever know the answer to that.

However, the last thing they need to do in NY is to drive out the tax base. We certainly don't need any more NY fled billionaires here in Florida. We have one too many now.

[meadowlander]

10. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos didn't create those products alone.

If they became billionaires off them it's in part due to underpaying labour, in part due to overcharging customers, and in part due to shirking on their taxes.

[thought crime]

12. Mostly from increase in undertaxed stock value, not from direct profits

[Chemical Bill]

19. And creating monopolies.

Amazon has a history of encouraging small entrepreneurs to sell their wares, but then Amazon finds the ones that sell well, and sells their own version at a lower price.

Gates gave loads of computers to schools, but did so to get those schools away from buying Apple computers and software.

[snot]

13. I suspect that the fortunes of the super-rich

were nearly all accumulated via direct or indirect unjust and/or destructive exploitation of one or more of their workers, consumers, neighbors, indigenous peoples, governmental processes and agencies, and/or the natural environment.

Per various sources, Elon Musk earns $698 million per day. Even if he works 12 hrs. per day for 365 days per year, that's over $58 million per hour.

There's just no way that each of our multi-billionnaires could have actually, fairly earned such gargantuan proportions of the humanity's total wealth.

[Prairie_Seagull]

9. Absolute power (wealth) corrupts absolutely.

Sure it can be said that some do some good. Given.
At what cost? The beating heart of a country?
Agreed, billionaires should not exist.

[gulliver]

11. Scapegoating instead of thinking hard is a burden on liberal politics.

Again, as I always say, we need to focus on what we want to get for the American People, not where the money comes from or what other people have. Bernie focuses on Medicare for All, and I think that's fantastic. I'm really not all that concerned with what the Mayor of New York thinks or says, frankly. He's just a mayor.

Fixating on billionaires and so-called equality is tempting but simplistic. I'm hoping that most people see that and that it's just a good resentment fix for doomscrolling purposes for them. Because, as a serious matter of actually achieving anything, well, it isn't one.

[snot]

15. Agreed that the super-rich are a symptom,

and that such fixes as a one-time wealth tax, or even higher annual income and property taxes on the rich, fail to address the underlying conditions that allowed the super-rich to accumulate their obscene riches in the first place.

Unfortunately, the means used by the super-rich to accumulate their wealth have been multifarious and complex, and very few of us actually understand them. One big problem area, e.g., has been our failure to adequately regulate financial markets; I can name > a dozen problems there alone:

Leveraged Buy-Outs or LBO’s
Speculative credit derivatives (CDO’s, CLO’s, et al.) (i.e., derivatives purchased not to hedge against a substantive risk intrinsic to the purchaser's business but merely as speculative bets on someone else's business. Dodd-Frank tried to help here but I'm not sure how far it got.)
Depositary and speculative investment banking in the same institution (i.e., we need to restore Glass-Steagall for real).
High-frequency trading
Stock buybacks
Executive compensation in the form of options exercisable within less than ten years
Manipulation of paper markets for metals and other commodities
The power of the Fed to buy securities of unsound companies
The various devices used by the Fed to indirectly set negative real interest rates
The elimination of the broker "fiduciary" rule
The termination of the dollar's convertibility to gold
Revolving door between Wall St. and its regulators
And of course the self-dealing by Congress in securities of the companies they have inside knowledge of.
Not to mention the lax SEC enforcement.
And many other kinds of rigging are accomplished via the tax code, trade agreements, etc.

The same kinds of lists could be compiled in many other areas of life (antitrust law, bankruptcy law, labor law, immigration law, environmental law, the law re- media ownership, campaign finance law, civil rights including the 1st & 4th Amendents re- speech and privacy, the requirements in order for the US to engage in direct or indirect warfare, etc., etc.).

Some practices unfairly exacerbating our wealth gap used to be prohibited or better-regulated, but such regulations are under constant, quiet attack by the rich, who can afford to retain whole armies of accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, publicists, think tankers, the MSM, and now even educators to chip away at everything that stands between greed and power – while also continually blowing smoke and generating side-shows to obscure what they're up to and divert and divide us.

The public cannot push for the right kinds of changes unless they or their leaders actually understand and care about more of this complexity. I believe we must also work much harder to find common ground with our fellows in the bottom 70% of the wealth curve, and organize to exert what power we still have effectively.

[gulliver]

17. Excellent points!

And great bottom line: "The public cannot push for the right kinds of changes unless they or their leaders actually understand and care about more of this complexity."

To a large extent, not just the billionaire class but the "billionaire entities" (funds, corporations, states, etc.) have the democracy at a disadvantage when it comes to power...for all of the reasons you mentioned. Our leaders need to be very wise to manage this complexity. That's especially challenging at a time when the very most capable people have little reason to serve the public and when the public are distracted and discouraged.

[Greybnk48]

14. I heard the term "unspendable wealth" the other day.

We have a minimum wage, now it's time for a maximum wage. The surplus goes back into the public coffers. It's a good idea.

[AllyCat]

16. Agreed.

And no "hiding it in nonliquid assets".

If we don't get to deduct our assets from our taxes and so on, neither can they.

[hamsterjill]

18. No one begrudges hard work and success.

But we don't need excess and ridiculousness. We don't need people starving and unable to pay for medical care when we have people with enough money that they can never spend in generations.