The struggle is real, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, but it’s not your fault.
Appearing on comedian Ilana Glazer’s “It’s Open” podcast in a May 7 interview, Ocasio‑Cortez, the New York Democrat often known as AOC, said the existence of billion‑dollar fortunes is more systemic failure than it is an accomplishment.
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
Donald Trump and his corrupt family have ~~earned~~ stolen billions in just few months.
otherwisepandemonium on
I always love the perspective of using seconds in place of dollars for the scale of wealth these people want.
1 million seconds is about 11.5 days. 1 billion seconds is *31 years*.
With $1 billion you can spend $1/second for 31 years straight before you run out of money. Even if you just put it into a HYSA, you’d earns tens of millions a year in free money from the interest.
But these ghouls want hundreds of billions of dollars, or in Elon Musk’s case, a fucking trillion (31,600 years in terms of seconds).
Fun_Elk593 on
correct. it’s theft and the only reason people don’t see it that way is because we were all born into this shit
Wonderful_Style7972 on
She’s not wrong. I would need to work for 200 years to earn a billion.
DrShadowstrike on
It’s crazy how she says the most simple truths, and everyone excoriates her for being some kind of radical.
RosetteNewcomb on
She’s absolutely right. You can earn $1 million, $10 million, $100 million. But you don’t make a billion dollars without causing severe harm to either workers or the environment. Like as much as I love Rihanna’s music, Fenty’s supply chain includes exploitation of workers in Asia.
“No billionaires” is the logical progression of “No Kings,” and I hope Dems are bold enough to run on it in 2028. It sounds like at least AOC is bold enough.
Ms_Freckles_Spots on
It is not moral to allow billionaires. The only way they become billionaires is through we, the people, allowing it. The people need to deeply understand that there is NO single person who can earn a billion dollars on their merit or that this person is that much better, more capable than another.
notmyworkaccount5 on
The party as a whole needs to lean into the messaging that the billionaires are trying to make you hate your neighbor so they can steal from you.
The true “welfare queens”, people actually leeching off our system are the billionaires. They benefit from the systems and infrastructure the most while giving back the least or none at all.
Taxing them isn’t punishing them, it’s just demanding they reinvest their stolen assets back into the economy they keep taking from. We the people need to remind them that heavy taxation was the compromise.
Legitimate-Garlic959 on
Not without exploiting other people
E1M1_DOOM on
Amen!
Absolutely nothing that you could ever contribute to the world in your time on this planet would ever be worth 1 billion dollars.
Nothing. Full stop.
A billion is an unconscionable and obscene amount of money.
doggoandsidekick on
If you cheat on an exam you did not “earn” an A
unaskthequestion on
A system which results in such a concentration of wealth that it corrupts everything it touches, lowers economic mobility and entrepreneurship and has a negative impact on economic growth (which is shown by the data) is a failed system.
squishyliquid on
Simply put, once you start paying others to do the work while keeping some of the profits for yourself, it’s debatable to say you’ve “earned” it. Earning implies working for it, at least in my book.
I didn’t bake the cake I paid the baker to make.
ilovetotouchsnoots on
Someone making $20/hour is uncontrollably shaking mad at this statement.
c0rnnut007 on
If you had $1B—you and your descendants could comfortably live ultra upper class lifestyles FOREVER just by riding the avg. investment returns of the stock market.
Having a $1B+ amount of wealth is an insane amount of money. No one “deserves” that much no matter how smart or hard they work. Sorry.
zurlocke on
I often see the argument:
“Did they work hard? Did they create something people want? Did they break any laws? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, then the wealth is earned and any challenge to it is envy.”
But this isn’t an analytical framework, it’s an ideological one born out individualism, in the sense that it naturalizes a historically specific arrangement of property relations and presents them as the neutral outcome of individual merit.
Who wrote the laws? Who maintains them? Whose interests do they structurally serve? These are the avoided questions for a reason.
frank1934 on
Oh yes you can, there’s no laws anymore for rich people
Beginning-2-Smell on
Hurry, please save the world from these powerful individuals and corporations working in tandem with corrupt politicians
Scharmberg on
I’d be happy to just have another $8k with no strings attached, honestly that would stabilize me so much.
You have people that are filthy rich complaining their number isn’t big enough and they already are set for lifetimes.
barnabasbones on
Let’s say you work 40 hours per week for 52 weeks per year at the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. How many years would it take to earn a billion dollars? $1,000,000,000÷($7.25×40×52)=66,313 years.
What would your hourly wage have to be to earn a billion dollars if you worked 40 hours a week for 60 years?
$1,000,000,000÷(40×52×60)=$8,012.82 per hour.
You cannot earn a billion dollars through wage labor.
anon-a-SqueekSqueek on
Like the most basic uncontroversial statement of all time. Defending billionaires is pathetic. Like relax, you’ll never be a billionaire, and it’s an immoral evil goal to even have – because stealing from others is litterally the only way.
eramthgin007 on
Lottery would be the only way right? Even then it’s luck. But everyone playing has the same rules and expectations going into it.
DawnSignals on
And if you could, low-wage earners certainly perform more labor than white collar trust fund assholes
OutsideGain7374 on
You did not become a billionaire without stepping on and breaking backs while getting there.
fantasyfootball1234 on
A billion dollars saved from earned income would be $33.34 million dollars per year earned for 30 consecutive years, paying no income taxes, and saving 100% of every dollar earned. And since they don’t give out fortune 100 CEO jobs to 30 year olds, that is essentially impossible to achieve.
The only way to have that amount of money accumulated would be speculative investing, inheritance, lottery, owning a company, or wielding immense power as a tyrannical king.
The implication of the comment is that billionaires are either extremely lucky or they are business owners who routinely exploit their labor force.
dodoh3 on
Makes even more sense in German where “earn” and “deserve” share the same word (“verdienen”).
ecwworldchampion on
Anyone who thinks they can “earn” a billion dollars has no idea how much money that really is.
Andysue28 on
Right wingers literally do not understand the difference between a million and a billion. The jump is astronomical.
futanari_kaisa on
Other people earn it for you and then you spit on them.
tgji on
I see the comments have attracted the usual “but Elon can’t actually spend those billions or it would crash the stock price” type arguments.
No, he can’t, but he does have ownership and control of that much wealth, which is a form of power and influence, and he can also leverage it (not just the power, but literally: he can take out debt against it, and spend what for most people would seem like infinite money).
So it doesn’t matter that he “doesn’t really have a billions dollars in the bank” – it’s still an incomprehensible amount of leverage that, as AOC is saying, was not “earned” in the same way most people earn their paycheck.
And if anyone believes he “deserves” it because of the “value” he created as an entrepreneur… please consider that there are 1,000’s of equally talented people who have tried but failed and in many cases, billionaires are simply lucky: they are statistical outliers who have had a series of wins that led them there, sometimes in spite of their talent, not because of it.
I have never, ever, been convinced of an argument against taxing wealth. If anything, we should be against taxing income from labour. It’s the other way around, and why? Because of the power these people have.
We created a society in which people can start a business and work hard and be rewarded for it. Not all societies past and present need to be this way. It’s good. But that wealth is extracted from society, and therefore it only seems fair to me that that wealth is taxed (and ideally, a lot more than income via labour).
Just my two cents.
itrEuda on
That’s crazy. All you need is a job paying you $641,025.65 per week for 30 years straight. It’s doable, but easier if you start with an early investment of around $1bn.
Tuungsten on
This is one of the basic conclusions of the labor theory of value.
Businesses will not pay you what the value of your labor actually is. They will pay you as little as you will tolerate. The difference in these numbers becomes profit.
The capitalist class creates value for itself by creating and maintaining a system where you are forced to sell your labor for a fraction of it’s true value. We are a nation of sharecroppers.
cinephileindia2023 on
Homo Sapiens evolved about 300,000 years ago. Civilization started forming about 6,000 years ago. Assume a Homo Sapien has been alive since 100,000 years ago. This is our hypothetical Immortal. Now assume this Immortal has been given $10,000 every day since 100,000 years ago. He would have $365,000,000,000 today. That is $365 billion.
For comparison, Elon Musk’s net worth as of May 11, 2026, was $816,000,000,000. That is $816 billion. Our hypotherical Immortal would still be short of $451,000,000,000. Let that sink in.
Spythe on
The fact that people are even arguing and upset she said this, just shows how cooked we are as a society.
AnAnalChemist on
I would argue it is possible to get to a billion through hard work, Taylor Swift warned a billion just through her tours and royalties of her songs. I get the sentiment from AOC though. But I’m not worried about someone who is worth a few billion from their business or music, but earning it through market manipulation and breaking rules, i.e. illegal naked short selling to bankrupt businesses. There are thousands of billionaires! We should start at the top and work our way down on how they “earned” it, not from the lowest.
soxperry on
> “And so, you have to create a myth that since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it,” added the New York Democrat.
The billionaire’s myth they tell you is “actually I did all the hard work and you didn’t. That’s why I’m here and you’re there.” Then they take credit for all their employers work. “Actually if it weren’t for my billions, you would t have a job.”
analogWeapon on
Why use quotation marks around “earn” in the headline? The whole headline is a quote. And it’s a plain fact. Use italics for emphasis.
Opcn on
So it’s not a billion but Bob Dylan sold his masters for ~$300-400 Million dollars. Assuming the same rule applies, would the idea be that his masters weren’t worth that much? Or that he didn’t own his own recordings of himself singing songs that he wrote?
7figureipo on
I like to think of this in terms of things everyone is familiar with: things you might buy and their impact on wealth.
A cup of coffee from Starbucks is to a millionaire what a first class plane fare is to a billionaire, what a new car is to someone with more than $10 billion, and what a new home is to someone with more than $100 billion.
So Elon Musk and Bill Gates can buy a new house about as often as your average upper middle class 401k account holder buys a cup of coffee without impacting their net worth hardly at all.
These people don’t earn that kind of wealth. The only way to get that wealthy is to lie, cheat, steal, exploit others, and leech wealth from the rest of society.
This-Above-All on
Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated to be at least 788 billion dollars. To have that much money, you would have to make $10,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year for 9,000 years. That would have been around the time of the Neolithic Revolution.
AOC is right. This wealth wasn’t earned in any sense of the word.
41 Comments
From USA TODAY:
The struggle is real, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, but it’s not your fault.
Appearing on comedian Ilana Glazer’s “It’s Open” podcast in a May 7 interview, Ocasio‑Cortez, the New York Democrat often known as AOC, said the existence of billion‑dollar fortunes is more systemic failure than it is an accomplishment.
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
Read more: [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/05/12/aoc-billion-dollar-wealth-not-earned/90032842007/](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/05/12/aoc-billion-dollar-wealth-not-earned/90032842007/)
Donald Trump and his corrupt family have ~~earned~~ stolen billions in just few months.
I always love the perspective of using seconds in place of dollars for the scale of wealth these people want.
1 million seconds is about 11.5 days. 1 billion seconds is *31 years*.
With $1 billion you can spend $1/second for 31 years straight before you run out of money. Even if you just put it into a HYSA, you’d earns tens of millions a year in free money from the interest.
But these ghouls want hundreds of billions of dollars, or in Elon Musk’s case, a fucking trillion (31,600 years in terms of seconds).
correct. it’s theft and the only reason people don’t see it that way is because we were all born into this shit
She’s not wrong. I would need to work for 200 years to earn a billion.
It’s crazy how she says the most simple truths, and everyone excoriates her for being some kind of radical.
She’s absolutely right. You can earn $1 million, $10 million, $100 million. But you don’t make a billion dollars without causing severe harm to either workers or the environment. Like as much as I love Rihanna’s music, Fenty’s supply chain includes exploitation of workers in Asia.
“No billionaires” is the logical progression of “No Kings,” and I hope Dems are bold enough to run on it in 2028. It sounds like at least AOC is bold enough.
It is not moral to allow billionaires. The only way they become billionaires is through we, the people, allowing it. The people need to deeply understand that there is NO single person who can earn a billion dollars on their merit or that this person is that much better, more capable than another.
The party as a whole needs to lean into the messaging that the billionaires are trying to make you hate your neighbor so they can steal from you.
The true “welfare queens”, people actually leeching off our system are the billionaires. They benefit from the systems and infrastructure the most while giving back the least or none at all.
Taxing them isn’t punishing them, it’s just demanding they reinvest their stolen assets back into the economy they keep taking from. We the people need to remind them that heavy taxation was the compromise.
Not without exploiting other people
Amen!
Absolutely nothing that you could ever contribute to the world in your time on this planet would ever be worth 1 billion dollars.
Nothing. Full stop.
A billion is an unconscionable and obscene amount of money.
If you cheat on an exam you did not “earn” an A
A system which results in such a concentration of wealth that it corrupts everything it touches, lowers economic mobility and entrepreneurship and has a negative impact on economic growth (which is shown by the data) is a failed system.
Simply put, once you start paying others to do the work while keeping some of the profits for yourself, it’s debatable to say you’ve “earned” it. Earning implies working for it, at least in my book.
I didn’t bake the cake I paid the baker to make.
Someone making $20/hour is uncontrollably shaking mad at this statement.
If you had $1B—you and your descendants could comfortably live ultra upper class lifestyles FOREVER just by riding the avg. investment returns of the stock market.
Having a $1B+ amount of wealth is an insane amount of money. No one “deserves” that much no matter how smart or hard they work. Sorry.
I often see the argument:
“Did they work hard? Did they create something people want? Did they break any laws? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, then the wealth is earned and any challenge to it is envy.”
But this isn’t an analytical framework, it’s an ideological one born out individualism, in the sense that it naturalizes a historically specific arrangement of property relations and presents them as the neutral outcome of individual merit.
Who wrote the laws? Who maintains them? Whose interests do they structurally serve? These are the avoided questions for a reason.
Oh yes you can, there’s no laws anymore for rich people
Hurry, please save the world from these powerful individuals and corporations working in tandem with corrupt politicians
I’d be happy to just have another $8k with no strings attached, honestly that would stabilize me so much.
You have people that are filthy rich complaining their number isn’t big enough and they already are set for lifetimes.
Let’s say you work 40 hours per week for 52 weeks per year at the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. How many years would it take to earn a billion dollars? $1,000,000,000÷($7.25×40×52)=66,313 years.
What would your hourly wage have to be to earn a billion dollars if you worked 40 hours a week for 60 years?
$1,000,000,000÷(40×52×60)=$8,012.82 per hour.
You cannot earn a billion dollars through wage labor.
Like the most basic uncontroversial statement of all time. Defending billionaires is pathetic. Like relax, you’ll never be a billionaire, and it’s an immoral evil goal to even have – because stealing from others is litterally the only way.
Lottery would be the only way right? Even then it’s luck. But everyone playing has the same rules and expectations going into it.
And if you could, low-wage earners certainly perform more labor than white collar trust fund assholes
You did not become a billionaire without stepping on and breaking backs while getting there.
A billion dollars saved from earned income would be $33.34 million dollars per year earned for 30 consecutive years, paying no income taxes, and saving 100% of every dollar earned. And since they don’t give out fortune 100 CEO jobs to 30 year olds, that is essentially impossible to achieve.
The only way to have that amount of money accumulated would be speculative investing, inheritance, lottery, owning a company, or wielding immense power as a tyrannical king.
The implication of the comment is that billionaires are either extremely lucky or they are business owners who routinely exploit their labor force.
Makes even more sense in German where “earn” and “deserve” share the same word (“verdienen”).
Anyone who thinks they can “earn” a billion dollars has no idea how much money that really is.
Right wingers literally do not understand the difference between a million and a billion. The jump is astronomical.
Other people earn it for you and then you spit on them.
I see the comments have attracted the usual “but Elon can’t actually spend those billions or it would crash the stock price” type arguments.
No, he can’t, but he does have ownership and control of that much wealth, which is a form of power and influence, and he can also leverage it (not just the power, but literally: he can take out debt against it, and spend what for most people would seem like infinite money).
So it doesn’t matter that he “doesn’t really have a billions dollars in the bank” – it’s still an incomprehensible amount of leverage that, as AOC is saying, was not “earned” in the same way most people earn their paycheck.
And if anyone believes he “deserves” it because of the “value” he created as an entrepreneur… please consider that there are 1,000’s of equally talented people who have tried but failed and in many cases, billionaires are simply lucky: they are statistical outliers who have had a series of wins that led them there, sometimes in spite of their talent, not because of it.
I have never, ever, been convinced of an argument against taxing wealth. If anything, we should be against taxing income from labour. It’s the other way around, and why? Because of the power these people have.
We created a society in which people can start a business and work hard and be rewarded for it. Not all societies past and present need to be this way. It’s good. But that wealth is extracted from society, and therefore it only seems fair to me that that wealth is taxed (and ideally, a lot more than income via labour).
Just my two cents.
That’s crazy. All you need is a job paying you $641,025.65 per week for 30 years straight. It’s doable, but easier if you start with an early investment of around $1bn.
This is one of the basic conclusions of the labor theory of value.
Businesses will not pay you what the value of your labor actually is. They will pay you as little as you will tolerate. The difference in these numbers becomes profit.
The capitalist class creates value for itself by creating and maintaining a system where you are forced to sell your labor for a fraction of it’s true value. We are a nation of sharecroppers.
Homo Sapiens evolved about 300,000 years ago. Civilization started forming about 6,000 years ago. Assume a Homo Sapien has been alive since 100,000 years ago. This is our hypothetical Immortal. Now assume this Immortal has been given $10,000 every day since 100,000 years ago. He would have $365,000,000,000 today. That is $365 billion.
For comparison, Elon Musk’s net worth as of May 11, 2026, was $816,000,000,000. That is $816 billion. Our hypotherical Immortal would still be short of $451,000,000,000. Let that sink in.
The fact that people are even arguing and upset she said this, just shows how cooked we are as a society.
I would argue it is possible to get to a billion through hard work, Taylor Swift warned a billion just through her tours and royalties of her songs. I get the sentiment from AOC though. But I’m not worried about someone who is worth a few billion from their business or music, but earning it through market manipulation and breaking rules, i.e. illegal naked short selling to bankrupt businesses. There are thousands of billionaires! We should start at the top and work our way down on how they “earned” it, not from the lowest.
> “And so, you have to create a myth that since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it,” added the New York Democrat.
The billionaire’s myth they tell you is “actually I did all the hard work and you didn’t. That’s why I’m here and you’re there.” Then they take credit for all their employers work. “Actually if it weren’t for my billions, you would t have a job.”
Why use quotation marks around “earn” in the headline? The whole headline is a quote. And it’s a plain fact. Use italics for emphasis.
So it’s not a billion but Bob Dylan sold his masters for ~$300-400 Million dollars. Assuming the same rule applies, would the idea be that his masters weren’t worth that much? Or that he didn’t own his own recordings of himself singing songs that he wrote?
I like to think of this in terms of things everyone is familiar with: things you might buy and their impact on wealth.
A cup of coffee from Starbucks is to a millionaire what a first class plane fare is to a billionaire, what a new car is to someone with more than $10 billion, and what a new home is to someone with more than $100 billion.
So Elon Musk and Bill Gates can buy a new house about as often as your average upper middle class 401k account holder buys a cup of coffee without impacting their net worth hardly at all.
These people don’t earn that kind of wealth. The only way to get that wealthy is to lie, cheat, steal, exploit others, and leech wealth from the rest of society.
Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated to be at least 788 billion dollars. To have that much money, you would have to make $10,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year for 9,000 years. That would have been around the time of the Neolithic Revolution.
AOC is right. This wealth wasn’t earned in any sense of the word.