Eric Siu debates whether billionaires actually earn their wealth. One side argues extreme wealth comes from market power and abuse, not merit. The other cites Taylor Swift, Oprah, and Elon Musk as examples of people whose billions reflect real value created.
There's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right? You can't earn a billion dollars.
That's right.
You just can't earn that. That's exactly correct. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. Yeah. You can pay people less than what they're worth. Yeah. But you can't earn that, right?
Okay, first of all, AOC is saying that if you've gotten a billion dollars, you, you You might have abused labor laws. You might have accumulated a lot of power. You might have not paid people well. Well, let's look at some examples here. Taylor Swift, worth $1 billion, more than $1 billion. What about Oprah? Worth more than $1 billion. How about Beyoncé? Same deal. When you look at everything that they've done, the products or services that they've provided, they've gotten— they've accumulated because their products and services are so good. They've accumulated all the fans that they've accumulated. Okay. And through that, through the money that they got, they invested in other companies as well, which those other companies created jobs. And those other companies, while they created jobs, more and more jobs because of the value that they added, right? And so I look at the amount of money that you've accumulated, that is just a function of how much value that you've added, okay? You can even look at the other people, right? You can look at Jeff Bezos. Well, Amazon built convenience for us. The fact that you can tap a button over here on your phone and have something arrive in the next few hours is pure magic. Okay. Elon has built with SpaceX or Tesla. So you might not like the person, but when you see those reusable rockets coming down, when you look at the satellites in the sky, when you look at all the Teslas, the electric cars out there in terms of the robots that he's built, all these people that I've mentioned, they've created immense value in different ways.
