Billionaires Are Terrified. They Should Be.
Sources
These Truths by Jill Lepore, https://bookshop.org/a/83711/9780393357424
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Izaguirre, Anthony, and The Associated Press. “New York Is Going to Tax the Wealthy’s Second Homes, but Not Tax Wealth Itself.” Fortune. Accessed May 11, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/08/new-york-is-going-to-tax-the-wealthys-second-homes-but-not-tax-wealth-itself/.
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Robins-Early, Nick. “How a Fiery Attack on Sam Altman’s Home Unfolded.” Technology. The Guardian, April 18, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altman-house-attack-ai.
Transcript
Hi it’s Monday, May 11th, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend, Leeja Miller. Last week, Steve Roth, the CEO of Vornado Trust, the largest commercial landlord in New York City, speaking during his company’s quarterly earnings call, claimed that the phrase “tax the rich” is just as bad as a racial slur. [insert clip] Roth was responding to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent video he released on Tax Day announcing his plan to increase taxes on properties in New York City that are second residences and worth over $5 million dollars. In the video, Mamdani stood in front of billionaire Ken Griffin’s penthouse apartment, and pointed out that Griffin bought the property for $238 MILLION DOLLARS and it isn’t even his primary residence. It is the most expensive home ever sold in the United States. Steve Roth said Mamdani’s statements were “irresponsible and dangerous” and Ken Griffin said that Mamdani pointing out where he lives–albeit only sometimes when he feels like it–makes him feel really unsafe. This sentiment echoes a larger trend of popular desperation and anger spilling over in a way that billionaires find threatening. They are finally being faced with the consequences of their actions, of 50 years of fucking around and finding out in the neoliberal playground that allowed them to amass their wealth to begin with, and the anger of the masses is reaching a fever pitch. Today we’re discussing why billionaires absolutely should be scared and how it is absolutely in their best interest to agree to taxation, because the alternative is probably far worse. First let me take a moment to pay the bills, because I am not, in fact, a millionaire, and I gotta keep the lights on.
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So let’s just pause and unpack this. A billionaire CEO thinks the act of someone pointing out publicly available information about another billionaire’s vacation home is “dangerous.” He thinks that calling for increased taxation on rich people is akin to a disgusting racial slur. Steve Roth, by the way, co-owns a major Manhattan office building with President Donald Trump and has done real estate deals with Jared Kushner’s family real estate business. This man is also 85 years old and not an idiot. He was born in 1941, he’s seen things, he’s seen the impact of actual racial slurs, of racism, on this country. In fact, Steve Roth is Jewish, likely a raging Zionist, that’s just a guess on my part but I bet I’m right, and on that same earnings call he added that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is, in his mind, akin to the phrase “tax the rich.”
Why would a billionaire, someone who has likely faced discrimination in his lifetime because of his Jewish identity, why would he find taxation to be akin to racism and anti-Zionism? The only answer I can fathom is that because for him his identity as a billionaire, as a member of the top 1% or really .1%, is the main source OF his identity. It is as strong if not stronger a defining factor of his personhood as his Jewish identity. He feels personally offended and defensive when he sees the mayor picking on his poor billionaire friend Ken Griffin. He feels personally victimized. By taxation. Ken Griffin himself, after Mamdani’s remarks, said quote “What Mamdani just did to me, and more broadly is doing to the city of New York, is triggering of the trauma I went through in Chicago.”
This had me reflecting on the book I’m currently reading which has been on my list for a long time and I FINALLY got off the waiting list at the library for it, it’s called These Truths by Jill Lepore, it’s a history of the United States and it is SO GOOD. It reads like a story, like I read it before bed when I usually don’t want nonfiction but I’m truly like yes tuck me in I’m ready for my story. Anyway, Lepore does a great job of never losing sight of the role that slavery played throughout the American Revolution–our history books tend to forget about the whole slavery thing when recalling the Declaration of Independence and the whole “all men are created equal” thing. We tend to write it off as well it was just of the time, that’s just how it was in olden days, slavery was normalized, they didn’t know any better. In These Truths, Lepore makes it clear, over and over again, that people understood the contradictions in their words and actions and they did it anyway. And the reason I bring this up in the context of the discussion we’re having around taxing the rich is because of course the American Revolution was instigated in part because of a fight over taxation. And I was struck by how frequently our founding fathers whom we revere so much likened taxation without representation to slavery. To be taxed without having a voice is to be a slave. According to many learned men at the time. And then when other people were like hey what. Hey you literally own slaves what are you talking about. Because people were very aware of the contradiction in real time on the ground. The wealthy white men said yes well. This is different. The people we enslave don’t know any better. Or they refused to engage with it. Or they said well my liberation must come first. Or there was some story they had sold themselves that made them think the humans they had enslaved deserved it and they did not. And to them taxation was just as bad. As slavery.
Fast forward to today, we have a group of people whose number one identifier is class. Above faith above race even, though that’s usually not a problem, above country of origin, it’s class. And that’s the billionaire class. The rest of us haven’t been as good at reaching class consciousness but the billionaire class knows they have to stick together in order to survive. And they are aware of their own contradictions but they have sold themselves a lie and try to sell us a lie, the same lie that Steve Roth went on in that call to sell to investors, that billionaires started from nothing, built the American dream, worked hard, deserve all their riches, provide jobs, pay taxes, and therefore deserve to be thanked and praised for it. He literally said that, that we should be thanking and praising the 1% instead of taxing them more. But this is the same lie we’ve been fed our whole lives, and Steve Roth and his ilk wouldn’t be so threatened by any of this if they thought that the lie was working. They know we can see through it. Our anger is palpable.
Two galas last week gave protestors an opportunity to make that anger known. At the Met Gala, the fundraiser for the Metropolitan museum of art’s costume institute that charges $100,000 a ticket and gives the rich and famous a chance to attempt high fashion in a way that makes it a fun spectacle to watch and judge, this year the Met named Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos as honorary chairs, which just means they gave a fuck ton of money to make themselves seem culturally relevant, and then the best Lauren Sanchez Bezos could muster for her red carpet look was a glorified mother of the bride look when the theme was “fashion as art” which is also a stupid fucking theme because fashion already is art BUT I DIGRESS, immediately after it was announced the whole shebang was dedicated to the Bezos creeps in February, a campaign calling for the boycott of the Met Gala sprang up overnight. Zohran Mamdani announced he wasn’t going to attend despite many of his predecessors doing so, saying he was too busy focusing on affordability to attend, again this man is a political genius he never fucking strays from the message, a guerilla activist group called Everyone Hates Elon also called for a boycott of the event, some stars got scared off from attending, and Everyone Hates Elon even staged a direct action in which they placed 300 bottles of fake urine inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a nod to reports that Amazon workers have to pee in bottles because they’re forced to skip bathroom breaks. They also projected giant videos interviewing Amazon workers onto the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and onto Bezos’s own penthouse. One projection said “If you can buy the Met Gala, you can pay more taxes.”
Also last week the right wing think tank the Manhattan Institute held their own gala, a $50,000 dollar per plate affair in midtown manhattan that honored hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a major Trump supporter, with its “Alexander Hamilton Award.” The event attracted hundreds of protestors who heckled attendees, arriving in their black tie gowns and tuxedos, by yelling, among other things, tax the rich and also Nazis. [insert clip]
And this comes on the heels, last month, of an attack on the San Francisco residence of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in which a man threw a molotov cocktail at Altman’s house before fleeing, attempting to gain entrance to the headquarters of OpenAI with a jug of kerosene, a lighter, and an anti-AI manifesto, but he was stopped before he could do any damage. This is an example of how the AI boom is adding massive fuel to the fire, no pun intended, of public sentiment against soaring wealth inequality, because now our entire economy is propped up by a few billion dollar AI companies whose value is based on nothing more than a hope and a prayer at this point and will likely bring about cataclysmic changes not only to the economy that will likely erase hundreds of thousands of jobs but also to our environment which simply cannot sustain the level of growth in AI data centers and the unconscionable amount of energy and fresh drinking water they use. The growth in AI, the wealth it is concentrating into a few hands, the potential for cataclysmic damage it can cause, is making the wealth inequality in our society impossible to ignore for more and more people. And unlike the taxes we want to impose on the rich, these consequences absolutely pose an existential threat to all of us.
Daniel Moreno-Gama, the man accused of throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, at one point posted online suggesting that people should be “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs” a reference to anti-billionaire darling Luigi Mangioni, who is still awaiting trial after his alleged murder in 2024 of UnitedHealth Group CEO in broad daylight on a Manhattan street. Both his federal and state trials have been pushed back to September, though the federal trial will likely be pushed back further due to the whole scheduling conflict that two simultaneous trials presents. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to charges in both cases. The prosecutor in the federal case pushed against the delay, saying “Your Honor need only look out the window to see the people that follow this defendant and believe that what he did was right.” From the courtroom to the streets of New York, to social media feeds, and no kings rallies across the country, everyone knows there is a cost of living crisis, everyone is pleading for a change, and some are getting desperate enough to act out on that crisis, through protest, through direct action, and through violence. We all know it, and you better bet the billionaires know it as well.
And now, the protestors showing up to their galas, to the streets outside their homes, are presenting a very real existential threat to the 1% that they cannot ignore. They are forcing them to contend with the consequences of their actions in a way they haven’t had to for decades. Suddenly, the bunkers they all built for the eventual societal collapse they assumed would result from their actions feel woefully insufficient. Because it turns out the biggest threat to billionaires isn’t some far off Mad Max style wasteland but is instead staring them in the face on the streets or at their front door. And they’re fucking terrified.
What’s wild, though, is that for all the violent rhetoric and actions being carried out against billionaires–the calls to eat the rich, the popularity of guillotine imagery when discussing the 1%--the vast vast majority of people aren’t screaming off with their heads. They’re screaming tax the rich. Asking for higher taxation is the moderate stance here. They should be glad that people want taxes and not revenge. It would, at this point, be in the 1%’s best interest to increase taxes. Taxation is the moderate stance here. Far from societal overthrow, taxation at this point would simply allow the state to redistribute resources in a way that makes existing under capitalism more comfortable for more people. Make America Great Again? In the 60s the highest marginal tax rate was 90%. The post World War II boom that led to American prosperity was spurred on in part from government-financed programs that ensured people had jobs and support to buy houses. Not all people. Not black people. But the whites of many socio-economic classes were doing pretty good during the post-war boom. Dreaming of raising yourself up to the middle class wasn’t far fetched. There actually WAS a middle class, where people could buy cars and houses and take a trip once a year. Right now the moderate stance is to raise taxes so that the government could actually provide for its people. That would benefit many people but it would also benefit the 1%, let’s be clear. They would be purchasing our compliance. It’s a lot easier to swallow capitalism when you’re also benefitting from it. It’s a lot easier to be lulled into a sense of consumerist fulfillment when you actually have the cash to be a consumer. Increased taxes are the moderate stance here. They should be glad that all most people want is taxes. We have been sold the lie for the last 50 years since Reagan Ruined Everything that taxation and regulation are dangerous radical communist talking points. There is nothing radical about Zohran Mamdani saying hey let’s tax millionaires for the second homes they own in New York City. If you own a SECOND HOME in New York City, let alone one that’s worth over $5 MILLION DOLLARS you can handle the tax. You should be glad he’s just asking for taxes. You should be glad we want taxes and not revenge. Ever heard of the French Revolution? Let me know if you want a separate video about the French Revolution because I’ve been meaning to go down an ADHD rabbit hole there. Suffice it to say despite moderates’ best attempts at appeasing the swelling angry peasant masses in France in the late 1700s, it was too little too late and the guillotine got a LOT of practice for a few years there.
The point is the people are furious and they’re increasingly consolidating who they’re pointing the fingers at. Turns out it wasn’t immigrants all along. Of course there are still MANY people who are pointing the finger at immigrants but there are also many people who voted for Trump and are realizing not only did he not deliver on his promises but he’s actually in bed with the very people attempting to screw us all over. And even the people like Megyn Kelly who say Trump could nuke an entire country and they’d still vote for him might not feel similarly about all the billionaires we’re watching completely fuck us all over. Trump has the cult of personality to protect him and even he’s had three attempts on his life, maybe more? I’ve lost count. These billionaires don’t stand a chance–they’re fucking us over AND they have horrific personalities just absolutely putrid. Deeply unlikable. That’s a bad combo. Especially when faced with the likes of Zohran Mamdani, a man so warm and charming even Trump himself was like I like this guy.
So the handsome young likeable guy is now naming billionaires by name and saying hey we are going to tax you, and the people are rightfully realizing who to direct their anger towards, and the stories they’ve been telling us for decades that they deserve their wealth and if you just work hard enough you can be wealthy too aren’t working, because we see how infrequently that works for people, and everyday people have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and are still spending most of their income on housing, if they have any at all, and then Trump starts a war and oil prices start climbing so people can’t even get to their multiple jobs without spending all their income on the gas to get them there, and people are terrified because they’re one missed paycheck away from living on the street, and people are in debt up to their eyeballs increasingly just to pay for the basics and stay afloat, and people can’t DO anything anymore because billionaires and private equity have commodified literally everything so you have to pay to exist, there’s not a lot to live for for a lot of people. There’s not a lot to lose. And that anger and that desperation is going to boil up and has to have an outlet somewhere. And we’re seeing a lot of that activity in New York City, which I think makes sense–it’s a place where every class lives within very close proximity to each other, from those barely making minimum wage, those without houses, and those buying $238 million dollar second homes. And Zohran Mamdani provides a constructive outlet for that anger that could genuinely improve millions of peoples’ lives in the city without resorting to violence, but if the billionaires refuse to play ball with him, if they continue to dig in their heels, if they continue to make absolutely asinine statements like that “tax the rich” is akin to a racist epithet, if they deny the people their constructive outlet for their anger and frustration, well. It’s gotta go somewhere. And I don’t condone violence, I am not encouraging it, I am a pacifist, but this is just common sense at this point. What else do you think could possibly happen? When people get uncomfortable enough they fight back. It’s just a question of how much discomfort it takes for violence to be the only plausible solution for people. And we’re already seeing some people come to that conclusion for themselves. We’re not there yet on the popular front. The people still want peaceable reform. Those of us who were here in Minneapolis this winter we didn’t see violent protestors rise up and bring out the guillotine, despite what Fox News would have you believe, we saw groups of neighbors coming together and loving each other and demanding better from our leadership and go around government, operate without government’s help, operate in spite of the government to provide the services to our neighbors that the government should provide. We created systems outside the government in order to support one another and it was really beautiful to witness. The only violence we saw was that violence perpetrated by the state. But that was before the latest conflict with Iran. What was just one year into this second Trump term. What will it look like if Trump makes good on his promises to send in ICE to New York City to crack down on immigration there, where the pressure cooker is already turned up to 11 and where you don’t have the cultural niceties of the midwest to fall back on? I’ve lived in New York and Boston, they don’t fuck around. What does it look like if Trump makes good on his threat to send in ICE or the troops or some other armed group to patrol our polling places in November when we’ve had six more months of anger and cost increases and pressure mounting? The MODERATE stance at this point is increased taxation. They should be glad all we want is taxation and not revenge. It might not stay that way for long.
Okay so what do these tax solutions look like? What would actually move the needle, and will increased taxation lead to the great millionaire exodus that is always threatened in places like New York City every time taxes are increased?
Mamdani’s proposed taxation of second homes valued at over $5 million dollars would raise about $500 million dollars for New York City. That’s a large sum of money but it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $80 billion dollars in property taxes that New York City collects every year. And while it has a lot of rich people up in a tizzy, the reality is that wealthy people don’t move and aren’t as transient as they want us all to believe. Tax flight is absolutely real, people do move to avoid taxes, but according to CNN, only about 15% of millionaires who move actually end up with a lower tax bill. And the social connections that wealthy people depend upon to create, maintain, and grow their wealth have a far greater impact on their choice to move. And a tax in New York City is not going to drastically change the draw of New York City. On top of that, the people that do actually leave major metropolitan areas in droves are young families who find the affordability crisis too much to bear so they move away to find a cheaper cost of living. Addressing the affordability crisis, which Mamdani aims to do, would likely reduce overall flight from the city, not make it worse. Ken Griffin, the owner of the $238 million dollar penthouse Mamdani pointed out has said his investment company is going to back off of New York City and double down in Miami. Miami. Griffin is betting that he’s going to convince New York finance bros to move to Miami. E financial careers dot com wrote an article about the potential move to Miami in which they interviewed various New York hedge fund managers. They did not sound convinced that a move to Miami would ever be on the table in the face of increased taxes, saying “It’s full of nouveau riche types. The flashy shallow financial crowd… The crime, homelessness and smell of weed are too much to bear. … There’s a lot of poverty and high crime in Miami. Ken Griffin has enough money to build himself a bubble. Not everyone can do that.” With another saying "Say I make $10m a year. 55% of that goes in tax in New York. In Miami, I save 7% in state tax, but private schools are a must there and the money I save goes on them. At the end of the day, I might save a few $100k but I'm in an isolated place miles from my family and network." And another saying "With that crowd migrating to Miami, New York actually might get pleasant again!"
All in all, the potential tax on second homes in New York city impacts about 11,000 of all homes in New York city, less then half of one percent, a drop in the bucket. Mamdani’s other proposals would impact a handful more people, but moderate Democrat mayor Kathy Hochul opposes them so it’s unclear if they’ll get passed. He is pushing for raising income taxes on anyone earning over $1 million per year by 2 percentage points. From 3.88% to 5.88%. This would impact about 34,000 households. Not many compared to the over 8 million total inhabitants of New York City, but studies show that the vast majority of economic spending happening in this country right now is being spent by the top 10% because the bottom 90% are barely making enough to get by. So if you scare away those million dollar plus earning households, there’ll be no one left in New York City to prop up the economy. But is that true?
According to the New York Times, quote ‘The mayor’s office often points to research by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, which found that wealthy residents of New York were less likely to move out of state than those in other income groups, and that they did not leave in large numbers after a major tax increase in 2021. City officials also highlight how wealthy residents are paying less federal taxes under President Trump’s “big beautiful bill.”
Other states have raised income taxes on millionaires, including New Jersey in 2020 and Massachusetts in 2022, and did not see significant departures. In Massachusetts, lawmakers approved a 4 percent tax on incomes over $1 million, and revenue has exceeded expectations.”
The New York Times article goes on to say quote “Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who appeared with Mr. Mamdani on Tax Day, said research clearly showed that the rich would not leave en masse.
“It is largely indeed a myth, and it’s more than that — it’s frankly almost propaganda,” he said. “There’s not a zero response. But it’s very small.”
Economists think there is likely some point at which increased taxation becomes counterproductive, with one model finding that combined federal, state, and local income taxes at a rate of 66% is the threshold, though of course the theory is untested. New York City’s combined rate is roughly 51% for the richest residents. And of course in the 60s we had income tax rates of 90%. But of course income taxes aren’t the full story, here. Because so many of the wealthiest people in America on paper have zero income at all to tax. Instead they live on their investments, they live on the debt they’re able to borrow against those investments, and that is where they are able to squirrel away and grow their wealth while paying very little for the benefit of living in the United States and profiting from the connections, the infrastructure, the education system, the labor extraction and all the other ways they benefit from being here.
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth has suggested that one way to close this loophole that the ultra rich use–borrowing money based on their stock portfolio, thereby never having to pay capital gains tax because they’re not technically selling anything–would be to levy a tax on those ultra high net worth individuals every time they borrow against their stock portfolio as a form of realized income. If you are making an income, in this case in the form of debt, based on the value of your stocks, that should be considered a realized gain and you should have to pay taxes on it. This would only apply to households with over $100 million dollars in assets. They estimate this proposal would generate about 46 billion dollars in income taxes over a decade.
There are many other ways to close tax loopholes that allow the ultra wealthy to avoid taxes. Requiring taxation of capital gains generally, not just when someone borrows against their assets, is also practiced in other countries around the world. There’s also the many inheritance loopholes that have been purposely drawn into the probate laws by wealthy people and the lawyers who rely on them for a pay check. For instance, adding a capital gains tax at death would mean that the estate of a wealthy person would pay tax on the capital gains the person realized during their lifetime and never paid taxes on. Currently, any capital gains that are never realized are erased at death, so if someone passes money on to their child, that child will only be taxed on realized capital gains AFTER they inherited the money. So if someone invests $10 and at the time of their death it’s worth $100 and they pass it to their heir, that heir only pays taxes on anything earned above $100. The $90 in unrealized capital gains goes untaxed.
Then of course there are the wealth taxes being proposed in California, and at the federal level by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, which would tax either one time or regularly ALL the wealth of the wealthiest people in the country. At the federal level they could also dramatically raise the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t been touched in decades and currently sits at a criminal $7.25 per hour. Adjusted for inflation it should sit at around $30 per hour. Instituting a higher minimum wage would help protect against the most egregious wage theft, because no one becomes a billionaire without extracting wealth from workers by paying them less than what their labor earns. Ensuring that companies can’t do this as egregiously would be a step towards tamping down on the incredible wealth gap in this country.
All of these fixes are complex but would actually start moving the country towards being able to regain the riches that the ultra wealthy are siphoning off the value being produced in this country. And all of them, every single one of these suggestions, is the moderate option at this point. Nothing I have said is anything particularly new, innovative, or untested, if you look elsewhere in the world, none of it is radical. Taxing the rich is a moderate stance to take. It is the final stop before revolution at this point. Because people are desperate and fed up with it and they know exactly who to blame for all of this. And because of the nature of campaign finance and lobbying in this country, there will be absolutely zero political will to do any of this, at least at the federal level, unless billionaires get on board, too. Because they’re the ones that have our politicians in a choke hold, and what they want matters in a way nothing else does. Billionaires would be wise to support increased taxation. They should be glad all we want is fair taxation. I’d prefer not to witness the alternative.
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about the new era of gerrymandering we just entered.
