Yes, we should have billionaires

Asked point-blank on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday whether billionaires have a right to exist, Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, didn’t hesitate: “I don’t think we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.” 

It’s a breezy soundbite typical for our era of populist discontent. But it also reveals a troubling worldview that sees extraordinary wealth as not even possibly the inescapable byproduct of innovation, but as necessarily a policy failure and sign of an economy built on extraction.

Mamdani’s view echoes that of other democratic socialists, including a senior adviser to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who once remarked, “There’s nothing in this world anybody wants or needs to do that you can’t do with $10 to $15 million.” In their eyes, every billionaire is one too many. But the logic behind this spurious claim is not just economically misguided—bordering on being a childlike view of how the world has worked for the past quarter millennium—it’s politically disturbing.

Some basics: Billionaires often emerge from entrepreneurs building companies that radically improve people’s lives by meeting their needs and desires. Amazon redefined convenience. SpaceX slashed the cost of space access. Apple turned the smartphone into arguably the greatest consumer item ever sold. The resulting fortunes were not extracted from the 99 percent or the 99.9 percent. They were earned through high-risk bets and long-term value creation. As Nobel economist William Nordhaus found, innovators typically retain just two percent of the social value they create. The rest benefits consumers.

Set aside billionaire bans. Imposing aggressive wealth levies risks killing tomorrow’s iPhones or Pixars before they’re born. Elon Musk nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX in 2008. Steve Jobs funded Pixar from his post-Apple fortune. In a world of punitive taxation, those bets likely wouldn’t have been made.

Inequality, frequently cited as damning evidence of societal injustice, is not inherently harmful. In free societies, wealth differences can reflect diverse preferences, choices, talents, and risk appetites. Likewise, wealth earned in competitive markets—rather than via cronyism or favoritism—is a welfare-generating feature of dynamic capitalism, not a flaw.

Finally, Mamdani’s stance empowers government in worrying ways. If the state decides how much wealth is “too much,” it moves dangerously toward politicized economic control. History shows such power rarely ends well for growth or for freedom. Certainly, any fan of Marxism should understand how socialism played out across the world in the 20th century and take deep pause from that survey. Yet the democratic socialists offer nothing more than a hand wave to such concerns.

Billionaires shouldn’t be worshipped, of course. But declaring their existence a failure or musing about a world without them misunderstands how prosperity in a free society is created—and who ultimately benefits from it.