Pity the poor billionaires – demands for higher taxes must feel hurtful | Arwa Mahdawi

Won’t anyone think of the poor, poor, billionaires? Their endless money can buy them political power, but it can’t buy them love. Instead of being worshipped by the hoi polloi, titans of industry are denounced! Despised! Disrespected! Insert another D-word of your own!

Thankfully, class solidarity is strong among the super-rich. Steve Roth bravely brought attention to the plight of his fellow billionaires during a recent earnings call. “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ … spit out with anger and contempt by politicians … to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs,” the Vornado Realty Trust CEO said.

One of the politicians Roth was referencing, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, has himself been subject to some “disgusting racial slurs”. The city’s first Muslim mayor was termed a “known jihadist terrorist” (among other Islamophobic names) by figures including fellow New York politician Vickie Paladino. While I can’t find evidence that Roth felt the need to comment on these attacks, he was upset that the mayor filmed a video announcing a tax on second homes worth more than $5m in front of fellow billionaire Ken Griffin’s penthouse. According to Roth, this was “irresponsible”. Which is a tenuous argument considering Griffin’s record-breaking penthouse wasn’t exactly flying under the radar. It was bought for $238m in 2019, the highest price ever paid for residential US property.

But I don’t mean to belittle billionaire pain here. It must be hard to hear people say shocking things such as: “Maybe we should restructure the tax code so the ultra-rich don’t pay lower effective tax rates than teachers.” It must hurt to imagine a future where punitive taxes mean people like Griffin can only afford pieds-à-terre in the $100m range.

Still, I do have good news: when you look past all this nastiness, things have never been better for billionaires. Their wealth jumped by more than 16% in 2025, three times faster than the previous five-year average, according to an Oxfam report. While billionaire wealth has increased by 81% since 2020, it adds, “one in four people don’t regularly have enough to eat”. (I think there’s a catchphrase about what they could eat – it rhymes with “the witch” – but I don’t want to peddle hate speech.)

Some more good news for the 1%: you own the news! In Oxfam’s words: “Billionaires own more than half the world’s largest media companies and all the main social media companies.” Which may explain why, despite surging inequality, wealth-hoarding oligarchs still have so many prominent fanboys. Wall Street Journal columnist Kyle Smith, for example, recently published a piece entitled Billionaires Rock in which he lamented how billionaires are “denounced, despised and disrespected”, noting: “Our greatest billionaires ought to have statues placed in public squares. Their stories ought to be taught to children as parables of inspiration.”

I know this reads like satire but look at who owns the Wall Street Journal and it will make sense. There’s no point trying to get a man to understand the unsustainability of widening economic divides when, to paraphrase the author and activist Upton Sinclair, his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Anyway, I’m sure Smith will be pleased to hear that we’re already erecting shrines to our ruling class. There’s now a big gold statue of Trump at a Miami-area golf course and the president is hopeful he’ll get more gold statues in Gaza and Venezuela.

With the Trump administration aggressively meddling in what schools and universities are able to teach, it may not be long until billionaire life stories are taught to US schoolchildren. Who needs to learn about slavery, and how it continues to shape the racial wealth gap, when you can hear the heartwarming story of how a young Mark Zuckerberg called a bunch of his peers “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data and then went on to build a trillion-dollar company accused of facilitating genocide?

But back to our poor oligarchs: what can be done to soothe their frayed nerves? If we can’t make billionaires a protected class or assign them each an emotional support politician, perhaps we can set up a hotline where they can hear reassuring affirmations whenever they feel sad. Or maybe we should all just chip in and crowdfund them a reality check.