New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has long been ruffling the feathers of the super-rich — both before and after winning the mayoral seat.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon, appears visibly riled as Mamdani pushes for the richest in society to finally pay their fair share.

Coincidentally, NY authorities recently forced Bezos to pay over $9 million in long-unpaid fines, which likely explains both his anger and his increasingly hostile rhetoric toward the concept of wealth taxes.

Nevertheless, Mamdani isn’t afraid to call their cynical agenda of greed to stand up for hard-working people, saying:

we’re hearing from one of the richest men that our world has ever seen about how he and others who make that kind of money shouldn’t have to pay their fair share.

Collins: Bezos said that you could double his taxes and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens.

Mamdani: I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ. And I think that if I was worth as much money as he was, then I would probably say the same thing.

The fact… pic.twitter.com/gO7E9Dj5CM

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 27, 2026

The super-rich don’t want Mamdani’s wealth tax — what a shocker!

Many Western politicians have often shut down the prospect of wealth taxes, arguing to ordinary people that the richest would just leave and that this would somehow make life even harder for hard-working people.

Bezos’ public — and tasteless — statements to detract from the potential of wealth taxes just go to further underscore who most politicians actually work for. Not the 99.99% increasingly taxed to make ends meet — whilst unable to meet their own household costs — but the 0.01% who continue to avoid tax and use their privilege to influence domestic politics.

However, they only reveal their cynical priorities of power and profits at the expense of the British public. After all, the PAYE system captures ordinary people, and they have no way to avoid the ever-increasing tax burden that falls on their shoulders, unlike the super-rich, who can structure their affairs to reduce or avoid tax.

As a result, Mamdani’s willingness to ‘break the mould’ set by corrupted Western politicians is refreshing and popularly received by the majority of people.

By finally reforming the tax system so that wealth bears more of the burden, Mamdani aims to ease the increasingly heavy burden on hard-working people, who the system repeatedly expects to foot the bill.

Bezos has attempted to hoodwink people in the US in an attempt to seemingly shut down discussion of introducing wealth taxes. Taxes which would be applicable to the only group in society who have seen their astronomical wealth increase exponentially year on year.

Saying anything he can to distract from a wealth tax, Bezos posted on X that tax should be eliminated for the bottom 50%. Subsequently, he attempted to say a wealth tax would have no impact on working people.

A lie quickly exposed by Democrat Bernie Sanders:

Mr. Bezos: Let’s have that debate.

Under my 5% billionaires wealth tax, we’d:

-Give $12K to a working family of 4
-Expand Medicare for dental, vision, hearing
-Guarantee universal childcare
-Raise starting teacher pay to $60K

And you’d still be worth $269 billion after taxes. https://t.co/2HhApfcnxe

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 21, 2026

Jeff Bezos went on national TV to complain about people villianizing billionaires.

THE VERY NEXT DAY Mamdani forced Amazon to pay $9 million in owed taxes

COMPANIES WILL PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE IF POLITICIANS MADE THEM

— daz (@MetamateDaz) May 27, 2026

Of course, he doesn’t want wealth taxes — but many super-rich DO

Whilst ordinary people find life getting harder year after year, the number of billionaires in the UK have doubled since 2010.

We wrote earlier this month about the harsh realities facing working people as a result of the greed of the wealthiest:

While the number of billionaires has doubled:

• Real wages have stagnated. Real pay grew by 4.5% since 2010 or 0.3% a year.
• The huge numbers in poverty have barely changed, rising to 13.4 million (2024/2025) from 13.0 million (2010/11).
• The number of those in insecure work has exploded, increasing by 800,000 from 2011 to 2024.
• The proportion of the wider workforce in insecure work also went up from 10.7% to 11.7% in the same period.

There is no smoke without fire — and this contrast only highlights how it is working people who create wealth as billionaires coin it in whilst the many see their purses tighten.

In the US, which we are often just a few years behind, this issue is even greater with billionaires increasing their wealth by 18% year on year. Having only had 66 billionaires in 1990, the US now has 800. In the UK, that has grown from 9 to 157 in the same time period.

This has meant that the US has been praised as the “clear leader in global wealth creation”. However, a small elite still controls that wealth, while governments and employers keep telling hard-working people and struggling families to tighten their belts, lower their expectations, accept stagnant wages, and abandon hopes of improving their prospects.

Instead, neoliberals force ordinary people to put up and shut up, while the richest increasingly dominate Western politics.

Let the good ones stay — let the greedy leave

It isn’t all of them though, like the greediest billionaires would have you believe. Nearly 80% of millionaires believe that the ultra-wealthy buy their political influence, and they have come together through the Patriotic Millionaires to actually make the case for wealth taxes.

In a recent poll conducted by the group, they found that 3/4 of the UK’s richest are:

far more concerned about doctors and other skilled professionals leaving the UK than wealthy individuals emigrating.

In fact, Phil White, member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, beautifully said:

Millionaires like us know how lucky we are to live in the UK and, as this polling shows, we are more than happy to invest in our country’s future.

It’s also no surprise to see that millionaires value doctors, young people, and business owners more than other millionaires, because people like this are the backbone of our country – they are the real wealth creators.

Therefore, people need to stop listening to greedy, gross billionaires like Jeff Bezos. Instead, they should start electing politicians like Mamdani, who will actually call a spade a spade and pursue real solutions to this neoliberalist manufactured crisis.

Society’s greediest figures will never help solve it — they played an instructive role in creating it in the first place.

Featured image via Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By Maddison Wheeldon

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