These Poor Billionaires Are Melting Down Over Taxing the Rich

Conjure in your mind's eye the most grating, cynically obnoxious forms of claiming oppression and wielding supposed traumas in service of winning an argument that you can recall from the last few years. Are you feeling annoyed now? Good. Now imagine that same rhetoric being uttered by some of the world's most rapacious, narcissistic, and spoiled elites: billionaires.

Well, you don't have to imagine it, because it's actually happening.

"I must say that I consider the phrase tax the rich — quote tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase 'from the river to the sea,'" Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steve Roth recently said on an earnings call, commenting on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's recently announced plans to tax luxury second homes owned by superrich people who don't live in the city.

Yes, you read that right: calling to tax the rich is the same as yelling a racial slur, and hoarding billions of dollars of wealth makes you, apparently, a victim of oppression akin to racial minorities. Pretty soon, Roth will be telling us that his more than $1 billion net worth entitles him to civil rights protections, and that trying to raise his taxes is a hate crime.

Roth is not the only billionaire who's seemingly been binge-reading old Tumblr posts from the 2010s. Fellow billionaire Ken Griffin, whose New York property was specifically mentioned by Mamdani in his announcement video, admitted he was left feeling unsafe and triggered by the callout. That's not me being sarcastic: he told Bloomberg that Mamdani was "triggering the trauma" he went through when he moved himself and his business from Chicago to Miami four years ago. Like many refugees seeking asylum from political persecution, Griffin found himself having to leave everything he ever knew behind in search of a new home — specifically, one of the more than dozen that he owns in at least nine cities around the world.

It's worth remembering at this point that both of these brave, traumatized survivors gave significant sums of money to groups that spent last year making and distributing defamatory ads painting Mamdani as an antisemitic hate-mongerer. One can only imagine the trauma these videos and mailers inflicted on the mayor. But then, hurt people hurt people.

We might also think about another Trump-supporting billionaire, Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman, who with one breath complains about how "DEI" on college campuses means everything is deemed racist and students demand protection from feeling upset, and in the next, whines about how "intimidating" antiwar protests "could be to Jewish and Israeli students" and that "racism against white people has become considered acceptable." This is besides his steady stream of tediously confessional tweets that would put most college freshmen's diary entries to shame.

"I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks. The same could be said for those [who] called out Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare," he informed us at the start of this social media journey. Yes, take a bow, Bill.

What is going on here? Just as the pro-Israel movement has hijacked the most grating aspects of liberal wokeness in the face of collapsing public support for its cause — the hyperfocus on marginalized identity and oppression, the crybully abuse of therapy-speak, the demands for censorship in order to be kept "safe" from upsetting ideas — another powerful group in poor public standing has clearly taken note: billionaires. And if the pro-Israel lobby can turn an anodyne phrase like "Free Palestine" into a hate slogan by simply baselessly insisting that it is, then hell, why can't billionaires do the same to a phrase like "tax the rich"?

But in reality, these few instances are just the most recent and particularly embarrassing evolution of a rich, long-running genre: that of sulking billionaires and their defenders trying to paint the most powerful people in the world as a poor, persecuted minority.

Think of the Wall Street Journal in 2023 leaping to the defense of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's ethically dubious taking of lavish gifts from a right-wing oligarch, complaining about the unfair "words and phrases" used in the story that broke it, like "superyacht" and "luxury trips." Or a then–senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute that same year objecting to the "unjust crusade" against a certain community, charging that "there is one group in society that apparently it's okay for us to ridiculate [sic], it's okay for us to vilify, it's okay for us to stereotype" and is "always responsible for real or imagined problems in our society." No, not Muslims or immigrants, but "billionaire producers." We can only hope that experiencing some of the greatest material excesses in the entire history of human civilization can help cushion the blow of such cruelty.

That year also saw Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz indignantly object to "this moniker 'billionaire,'" which he was repeatedly labeled at a Senate hearing about his illegal union busting, probably because he literally has billions of dollars. It called to mind resort tycoon Stephen Cloobeck in 2017 lodging his own objection to what he called "the millionaire and billionaire word," as if describing a wealthy person's net worth is a barely utterable slur. Happily, Cloobeck has managed to overcome the oppression his people have faced by going from a mere hundred-millionaire when he said this to now being a full-fledged billionaire.

Around this same time, Elon Musk similarly moaned that "the 'billionaire' label . . . is almost always meant to devalue and denigrate the subject." But rapper Jay-Z, then worth more than $1 billion, one-upped them all: the word "capitalist," he said in 2022, was a derogatory word on par with being "called n*****s and monkeys and s***," and suggested it had been invented to bring down African Americans like himself who had entered the ranks of the 0.1 percent.

Schultz, by the way, had a history of this kind of thing. The first time he complained about "the moniker 'billionaire'" was in 2019, when he urged people to use more net-worth-sensitive terms like "people of means" or "people of wealth" instead. Those didn't catch on, but rumors have it that Schultz is currently workshopping "bxllionaires."

To be fair to Schultz, 2019 was the year Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren launched their runs for president, so a lot of people experiencing wealthiness were having a hard time.

Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman griped about the idea of a wealth tax and the candidates' "vilification of billionaires" and how it went against the virtue of "tolerance," before actually breaking down on air and weeping. Goldman Sachs senior chairman Lloyd Blankfein warned that "vilification of people as a member of a group may be good for [Warren's] campaign, not the country."

This is not even as hysterical as this whining got. In 2017, as Seattle moved to slap an income tax on high earners, one opponent of the measure wrote: "Substitute the word 'rich' for any other word — let's say 'Asians,'" and the idea "would be racist, wouldn't gain any traction, and certainly would not pass." But unfortunately, "the only socially acceptable group of people it's okay to pick on is 'the rich.'" Another opponent of the measure got up in front of the city council and compared it to rape:

Your misguided effort to force yourselves on your neighbors and force a reinterpretation of state law brings to mind the common refrain, "Yes means yes, and no means no." . . . How many times do the targets of your undue attention and envy need to say "no," before you respect their wishes?

As bad as all these were, they arguably didn't hold a candle to Wall Street meltdowns under Barack Obama — a president who, it should be remembered, protected bankers from criminal prosecution over widespread fraud that crashed the world economy. The plumbing in Wall Street must have been spiked with something at the time, because several billionaire bankers publicly hallucinated that it was 1930s-era Germany and they were Jewish shopkeepers being assaulted and discriminated against by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs.

That included Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder of private equity giant Blackstone, who in 2010 compared Obama's modest tax reform proposals for the finance industry to Hitler invading Poland. A year later, as Obama's campaign manager met with a gaggle of top Wall Street donors, one of them suggested that the then-president do a version of his unifying "more perfect union" speech that tackled racial resentment, only this time discouraging resentment of the rich instead. Team Obama, preferring he actually win reelection, did not go with the idea.

This is all laughable and rather pathetic. But it does beg the question: Which powerful people will next glom on to wokeness to shield themselves from public ire over the things they do? Will Vladimir Putin cite his "trauma" next time he attacks a kindergarten? Will weapons manufacturers tell investors about their "lived experience" on earnings calls? Will oil executives declare that supporting the Green New Deal is tantamount to calling for their genocide? I can't wait to find out.