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Welcome to the Plunderdome: How Big Tech Sold Out Its Climate Pledges to Power AI
Amazon and the rest of the once aspirationally green tech industry are adding 19th-century smoking chimneys to their facilities in order to churn out more Compute, the 21st century equivalent of wool or steel.
Sep 30, 2026
Return with me now to the thrilling days of yesteryear. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon had paid a few hundred million dollars for the naming rights to the new hockey rink in Seattle. But instead of calling it Amazon Arena, he instead decided to commemorate his recent signature on a pledge to go carbon neutral. The name Climate Pledge Arena, if not as mellifluous as Wrigley Field or Candlestick Park, was intended, he said in an Instagram post, to be
a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action.
Oh, and it would also be
the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world, generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL.
Look, even then this seemed mostly PR. Amazon first committed to the Climate Pledge itself—net zero by 2040—the day before a giant 2019 walkout organized by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The arena seemed kind of gimmicky from the start. As Ken Belson reported at the time:
Watermelons are served as vegan sashimi, and their rinds are pickled and used in salads. Carrot tops are turned into gremolata, a condiment.
Still, credit Bezos with recognizing the spirit of the moment. Greta Thunberg and her numerous compatriots had scared the oligarchs and financiers of the world into at least rhetorical action. (He could have named it Greta Garden). As he said at the time:
Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.
But that fright has faded over time, even as the effects of the climate crisis have become ever more legible. And in the eternal battle between fear and greed, the latter has taken on more prominence in the last couple of years. In fact, it would make sense to rename the hockey rink, perhaps AI Avarice Arena.
That’s because Amazon—and, as we shall see, the rest of the once aspirationally green tech industry—are adding 19th-century smoking chimneys to their facilities in order to churn out more Compute, the 21st century equivalent of wool or steel. It’s hard to keep track of the ever-mutating list of grand new plans, often named things like “Prometheus” (or, in the weird case of one Ohio behemoth, “Socrates the Younger”), though here’s a brand new attempt to do so from the folks at Climate Power.
On at least one list of the most polluting proposed data centers, Amazon’s planned facility in Pecos, Texas comes in at the top; indeed, by some calculations it would be the single largest source of climate pollution in the US, with 35 giant natural gas turbines burning through vast quantities of fracked gas. On that same list, if you look carefully, Amazon’s planned “energy campus” in Pennsylvania would come in fourth on the list. Anyway, far from heading for net zero, Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions were up 16% last year.
Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, was designated to go to New York and take the company’s lumps during Climate Week; she told a gathering organized by the news site Semafor that the company needed to “do better.” Not on lessening its environmental impact, but on “communicating its environmental impact.”
There is a lot of debate, backlash against data centers in this country right now, and one of the things that we’re doing is taking a look at what have we done well and where have we fallen down and what do we need to do better. And so, we’re revising a number of our practices. We’re calling for a lot more transparency and accountability because that’s what people in these communities deserve. We’re saying, "Hold us accountable for our practices."
I read this to mean: "It’s getting harder to build data centers, so we’re going to try and up the ante for local communities with more payouts." (Word came today of one Pennsylvania data center that will offer $10,000 to every family in town if they’ll just change the zoning code and let them build).
But of course even if they figure out how to buy off the communities where they want to build their factories, it won’t affect by an iota the quantity of greenhouse gases they plan on pouring into the air—or the fact that this vitiates all their proud climate pledges.
Amazon is not alone, of course. Meta, for instance, had joined RE100, a renewable energy campaign all the way back in 2016, when it was still known as Facebook. It left this summer because… it wanted to use gas, not renewables, to power its data centers. As ESG News reported:
"After several in-depth conversations between Meta and Climate Group, Meta has withdrawn from the RE100 initiative, as it is no longer able to meet the technical criteria due to investments made in new gas power,” a Climate Group spokesperson told the website.
The withdrawal comes as Meta expands its global data center footprint. The company has entered arrangements that support new natural gas generation to supply growing electricity demand.
In Louisiana, utilities are expected to bring 10 new gas plants online to support Meta’s Hyperion data center.
Google reported an 18% increase in emissions in 2025. If you want to talk about an example of fairly comprehensive corporate failure, consider this. As Heather Clancy reports:
Google’s cumulative emissions have risen more than 80% since 2019, the baseline year for the company’s “intentionally aspirational” pledge to cut its operational emissions and certain supply chain emissions in half by 2030.
Planning to cut your emissions in half and instead raising them by eighty% led the company’s chief sustainability officer to change the title of her office to tell investors that they were “navigat[ing]the tension between hyper-growth and environmental stewardship.” In this case, “navigating” seems to involve accelerating full speed ahead into the iceberg that you identified a decade ago.
And of course there’s Elon Musk, whose Colossus data centers in the Tennessee-Mississippi corridor set the early standard for environmental irresponsibility, pouring pollution into poor Black neighborhoods and triggering a wave of lawsuits. Dave Roberts and I were on a panel early in Climate Week with LaTricea Adams of Young, Gifted, and Green and Abre’ Conner, director of Environmental and Climate Justice at the NAACP, and I would not bet against their ability to bedevil the richest man in the history of the world.
In fact, that pushback is now beginning, and the oligarchs behind these hyperscalers are clearly an important target. Not the only target. As Amy Westervelt notes: “We gotta start referring to data centers by both their mother and father's last names, Spain style. The Microsoft-Chevron data center, the Meta-ExxonMobil data center.” And of course we should keep beating on the dirty truth that much of the data center capacity is directly employed in raising the planet’s temperature—as Emily Atkin pointed out last month, companies like Amazon are marketing their AI services to the oil and gas companies to help them find more crude, and this may ultimately do even more damage than their emissions.
Still, the easiest way for organizers to operate may be simply to connect the much-despised oligarchs with the increasingly-despised data centers and in turn with every climate disaster that now unfolds. This is starting to happen. I got to join a demonstration outside Amazon HQ in Manhattan last week, and a day later the folks from Climate Defiance managed to shut down a program with the company’s sustainability guru “in less time than their warehouse worker’s pee break.” It’s definitely worth watching the action. As organizers explained:
A company that co-founded something called "The Climate Pledge" is now building the single largest source of climate pollution in the country, on purpose, in 2026. Lol. No really, it's utterly fucked.
But don't worry guys, because we have a pledge too. And one that we won't break...
We solemnly pledge to keep disrupting all the BS "sustainability" directors doing Simone Biles-level backflips to make emissions sound like a hipster yoga retreat while the planet burns. We pledge to keep confronting all the cowardly politicians who take corrupt death-enabling money while calling it economic development. And we pledge to keep coming for ANYONE who thinks merely uttering the word "pledge" is a substitute for actually keeping one.
Remember, as I said above, that for a jerk like Bezos the equation is always going to be greed versus fear. If he had a mild moment of social responsibility a decade ago, greed has ruled him in recent years (his one useful action this decade was trading in his wife for a younger model, thus freeing McKenzie Scott to become one of the most remarkably effective philanthropists in American history). But fear—of damage to reputation, of investigation by new majorities in Congress, maybe even someday of consumer boycotts of his ever-shabbier and more self-serving empire—might inspire change. (And if you want another reason to dislike them, read this account of waves of drones dropping packages across a test area in suburban Texas. “We hear them zoom, zoom, zoom, back and forth from morning until past dinnertime,” one resident explained).
If you think this is confined to America, think again. Ketan Joshi provides an excellent report from Down Under, where they threaten the country’s efforts to truly rein in emissions. Meanwhile, from Denmark, I had an email today from Søren Hermansen, the hero of the pioneering wind power buildout on Samsø Island, which became a model copied around the world:
I am struggling with Microsoft here in Denmark. They want to establish 2-3 data centers in one municipality and several more all over Denmark.
The two I am involved in are among the largest in Denmark covering 60-70 hectares of building and 110 hectares of land used for diesel-gas turbine back up with a depot of 25.000 tonnes fuel oil for emergencies.
Microsoft is acting like colonial criminals and there is no way we can find the head of the dragon. Every time we find a CEO it is always a lower ranking person who can not answer anything but has to go back and ask someone higher in the system…
The already proposed data centers in Denmark will more than double the total Danish electricity consumption. In other words we will return to the fossil fuel area 30-40 years ago and carbon emissions will skyrocket.
It is all dire. But it can be fought—we are winning plenty of battles.
Earlier this summer, for instance, Microsoft backed away from its commitment to build a giant gas-fired data center in West Virginia. It never said why, but the folks at Stand.Earth speculate that “the groundswell of community resistance and threat to its 'climate leader' public image played a bigger role than they’d like to admit.” As Monica Nickelsburg had reported:
An analysis by Michael Thomas, CEO of the renewable energy research firm Cleanview, estimates the project could increase Microsoft’s data center emissions by 40%.
AI is proving to be plenty unpopular for its own reasons. Microsoft’s Bill Gates warned on Meet the Press yesterday that it could cause “a billion deaths” if “something goes wrong.”
But of course on the climate front something is already going wrong. The closest thing we have to a number comes from a 2021 study, which found that for “every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 that we add beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, we will kill one person.” The Amazon Pecos Ranch project is projected to generate 33 million tons of carbon equivalent annually. You don’t need to ask ChatGPT, you just need a calculator. That’s about 7,442 lives right there.
Ridicule is useful too, of course. I’m grateful to Brian Kahn for an alternate list of names for Bezos’ arena. I think my favorite is The Plunderdome, though The Arena of Public Relations isn’t bad either.
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Trillionaires Are Only Possible Because They Don't Pay Taxes Like Ordinary People
Without endless tax deferrals, they would have only a tiny fraction of what they own today, yet, as things stand, nothing stops them from wielding the power and influence their wealth buys to benefit themselves.
Jul 31, 2026
The valuation trends up and down, but one thing’s for sure: Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire this summer. At the height of the SpaceX IPO he was briefly worth around $1.45 trillion.
Then SpaceX stock tanked, rallied, then tanked again. But the most important thing about Musk’s wealth isn’t whether it stays above the 13-figure threshold—it’s that 94% of it comes from not having to pay taxes on unrealized gains.
That’s right: Musk’s fortune effectively comes from not paying taxes.
It’s no exaggeration to say that trillionaires (Musk likely won’t be the last) are creatures of the tax code. They ought to be called “taxillionaires.” If it weren’t for laws that permit the wealthy to endlessly defer paying taxes by keeping their gains unrealized, there would be no trillionaires—and many fewer billionaires.
We should end the practice of funding billionaires’ and trillionaires’ accumulation of power at public expense by letting them amass yet larger fortunes without paying taxes.
According to Musk’s own account, when he sold his stake in Paypal in 2002, he netted $180 million, invested it all in SpaceX and Tesla, and borrowed to pay his living expenses. To get from $180 million to a trillion today implies annual returns of over 40% (returns that would be considered impossible for ordinary investors).
Allowing these returns to compound untaxed supercharges growth.
Musk paid some taxes along the way, when he exercised stock options or sold some Tesla shares, but any taxes he paid are insignificant compared to his wealth. By contrast, for most working Americans earning a good salary, total state and federal taxes are significant—typically around 40%.
They can put limited amounts in tax-deferred IRAs, 401(k) plans, and the like. But most of their savings comes from net paychecks after withholding for federal, state, local, Social Security, unemployment, and Medicare taxes. Musk is effectively exempt from these taxes.
But he doesn’t have to be.
Suppose he were subject to the same taxes on his annual wealth increase that most higher-earning Americans pay on what they make, and had to sell some Tesla and SpaceX shares to pay those taxes. We crunched the numbers based on the latest figures, and found he’d be worth around $47 billion today—rich enough to afford the most lavish lifestyle imaginable, but not a trillionaire, and not richer than the GDP of most countries.
It’s the same story for Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and other multibillionaires.
The vast bulk of their fortunes came from not paying taxes on their wealth as it grew. Without endless tax deferrals, they would have only a tiny fraction of what they own today (although that tiny fraction would still be a huge amount of money). Yet as things stand today, nothing stops them from wielding the power and influence their wealth buys to benefit themselves.
In the 2024 elections, Musk was the largest campaign donor, giving $291 million. That’s chump change for him, but it bought unprecedented power: lucrative contracts, the suspension of investigations of Musk’s businesses, access to government data, and the authority to dismantle government programs—including disruptions to foreign aid which are projected to result in over 14 million people dying from preventable diseases.
It’s a vicious cycle of wealth begetting power which begets more wealth, diverting it from the needy and vulnerable. We’re in the grip of unprecedented power accumulated by private, super-rich individuals.
We can check their power by fixing the untaxed wealth problem. We should end the practice of funding billionaires’ and trillionaires’ accumulation of power at public expense by letting them amass yet larger fortunes without paying taxes. We should adopt sensible policies requiring them to pay their fair share, such as the Billionaires Minimum Income Tax Act introduced in Congress in 2023.
Over the next decade, we will face crisis-level national debt and unmet needs for healthcare and retirement income. That will force us to decide whether to leave the vast pool of billionaire and trillionaire wealth untouched, or tax them like the rest of us to curb their influence and address public needs. The choice is ours.
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What's Happened to the WaPo Opinion Page Since Bezos Took the Wheel?
A year ago Bezos declared that Post Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets"; since then, the page has touted AI and data centers and lambasted wealth taxes and social safety net programs.
Jul 12, 2026
It’s been an eventful year since Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Adam O’Neal for the prestigious job of Post Opinions editor. O’Neal was an unusual hire, a 33-year-old with little by way of managerial experience. But O’Neal had a redeeming quality: He was ready to shill for Bezos, and the man Bezos has been desperately wooing, President Donald Trump.
It’s remarkable how far Bezos has come since 2013, when he said he purchased the Post from the Graham family out of a sense of civic duty.
Bezos was still singing a similar tune nearly midway through Trump’s first term, telling Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner (4/28/18), “I would be humiliated to interfere” with the Post’s coverage. “I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red… It would feel icky; it would feel gross.”
But days before the 2024 election, with Trump looking like he might return to the White House, Bezos apparently got over his queasiness and personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). “Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos,” The Wall Street Journal (7/2/26) reported.
It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.
Bezos followed up by declaring that Post Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets,” while “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Coming a month into Trump’s second term, this came across as another gift to the president (FAIR.org, 2/28/25).
‘Unapologetically Patriotic’
To lead the newly oriented Opinions page, Bezos tapped O’Neal, who had been a correspondent for The Economist, editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, and executive editor at the conservative Dispatch for just one year.
In that last role—apparently O’Neal’s only newsroom managerial experience—he quickly alienated the Dispatch staff. “He was a competent editor who had no idea how to talk to another human being,” a former associate of O’Neal’s told Status (7/18/25):
He was tough on reporters, sure, but that’s common in newsrooms. He just couldn’t express even the most minor thing without being abrasive, hostile, or raising his voice.
After being named to his post in June 2025, O’Neal declared that Post Opinions would be “unapologetically patriotic” and “communicate with optimism about this country.” This echoed Bezos, who declared a month into Trump’s second term, “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so.” Bezos was, of course, echoing Trump’s “America first” rhetoric.
O’Neal has demonstrated his patriotism by overseeing an editorial page that has backed Trump in destroying the East Wing of the White House (10/25/25), kidnapping the Venezuelan president (“one of the boldest moves a president has made in years”—1/3/26), militarily taking over DC (8/11/25; FAIR.org, 8/14/25), and unprecedented gerrymandering (8/20/25). (When Democrats responded in kind, the Post decried the “power grab”—4/21/26).
The Post’s pro-Trump boosterism under O’Neal has been so over the top, wrote Chris Lehmann (The Nation, 2/4/26), it’d “be a stretch for Pravda to pull off.”
“I try to avoid reading what the opinions section publishes,” a current Post staffer told Status (5/10/26). “I can’t tell if some of these arguments are being made in good faith or not. Sometimes it just seems like rage bait.”
‘Being Reconciled Is Not Enough’
While O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, did everything Bezos could have asked for—spiking the Post’s Harris endorsement and a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech moguls as Trump supplicants (FAIR.org, 1/7/25)—he did it without zeal, which Bezos found intolerable. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos wrote, in explaining Shipley’s February 2025 resignation.
Shipley had voiced concern over the direction Bezos was taking the Post, warning the billionaire that spiking the Harris endorsement days before the election and yanking Opinions rightward could turn off subscribers. “I don’t care,” Bezos replied (New York Times, 3/14/26). (Shipley proved correct; Bezos’ interventions led to over 375,000 Post readers canceling their subscriptions—NPR, 1/30/26.)
Replacing Shipley, O’Neal wasted little time in transforming Opinions’ editorial outlook, and its personnel. In his first email to the Opinions desk, O’Neal encouraged his colleagues to get with the program or quit, mimicking Bezos’ message to Shipley. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”
Seeing the writing on the wall, many of the Post’s centrist and left-of-center columnists took the generous buyouts on offer (which some had been contemplating since before O’Neal was hired). Gone in quick succession were Perry Bacon Jr., Philip Bump, Jonathan Capehart, Joe Davidson, Marc Fisher, Glenn Kessler, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson, Eduardo Porter, and others. “It’s just an absolute exodus,” a Post staffer told Politico (7/28/25).
The paper’s last full-time Black Opinions columnist, Karen Attiah, was fired in September 2025 (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; FAIR.org, 9/23/25). (Theodore R. Johnson of New America writes roughly once a week as a contributing columnist, but is not on staff.)
Bezos hollowed the Post out further in February when he laid off nearly half of the newsroom, in what “may have been the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation” (Washingtonian, 2/9/26).
Publicly, Bezos claimed he was doing this for the long-term viability of the paper. To be relevant, the Post has to be a “profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin (CNBC, 5/20/26). Otherwise, “it would be like poetry without rhyming.”
Privately, however, Bezos told Trump that Post employees “are terrible…. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book Regime Change.
To make the Post more like his other companies, Bezos needed “hell yes” management, like Adam O’Neal (and former publisher Will Lewis).
O’Neal, in turn, needed fellow travelers, and seems to have hired exclusively MAGA-friendly columnists. According to media critic Adam Johnson (Real News Network, 5/22/26), the Post
purged its opinion page of its actually popular writers and replaced them with charmless Economist and Wall Street Journal also-rans so they can spew libertarian cliches [and] tedious anti-woke screeds.
‘A Whole Bunch of Incredible Miracles’
O’Neal’s fealty to Bezos is most blatant in Opinions’ approach to artificial intelligence.
“All of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI,” Bezos told the Financial Times (6/11/26). “We’re in the middle of multiple golden ages right now, certainly with AI,” he continued, sounding every bit the snake oil salesman. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”
And Bezos is banking on these miracles to expand his empire on Earth and in space. Despite being worth a quarter-trillion dollars, Bezos is presently scouring the globe to raise $100 billion for a new fund that plans to buy companies in industrial sectors and improve them using AI (Forbes, 3/19/26). Bezos’ latest effort aligns neatly with his new role as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a low-profile AI company that’s raised $18 billion in funding (Morning Brew, 6/12/26).
Meanwhile, Amazon—the company Bezos founded, where he remains the largest shareholder and executive chair—“recently placed a series of staggeringly expensive bets on artificial intelligence, audacious even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s ongoing trillion-dollar AI bacchanalia,” Bloomberg reported (5/14/26).
With so much on the line, Bezos has little patience for doomsayers who fear AI will cause mass job loss—the very thing Wall Street is salivating over. Sure, AI will be “shrinking the number of people needed by 10x,” Bezos told The Wall Street Journal (6/11/26). But the technology will in fact create “more than 10x” as many jobs, he said. The suggestion seems to be that more than 90% of us will soon be in hitherto unimagined job categories made possible by artificial intelligence. (Bezos’ fellow tech titans recently started following his lead and saying similar things about AI job losses.)
Despite Bezos’ rosy outlook, “the public isn’t so reassured,” the Journal reported (6/13/26) two days later, citing a Pew Research Center survey from March. “Only 17% of Americans say AI will have an overall positive effect on the US over the next 20 years.”
And the data centers needed to power AI fare little better. “Americans have changed their minds about data centers. Decisively,” reported the outlet Heatmap (6/2/26), which conducted a recent poll. “At least 7 in 10 Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home… a record low.”
Opposition to data centers—and their insatiable demand for power and water—has become “The Most Bipartisan Issue Since Beer,” according to a New York Times headline (5/1/26).
‘Data Centers Don’t Deserve So Much Hate’
With the American people on one side of the AI divide, and Bezos and his fellow tech oligarchs on the other, O’Neal has rushed to his boss’ rescue (FAIR.org, 11/20/25). Here are some recent Opinions headlines (a couple have been subsequently altered):
- “Why the AI Jobs Panic Is Misplaced” (2/17/26)
- “Halting Data Center Construction Will Entrench Inequality” (3/24/26)
- “High Energy Bills? Blame the Trial Lawyers” (4/24/26)
- “Blocking the Construction of Data Centers Is a National Security Risk” (5/28/26)
- “AI Backlash Threatens to Hold Kids Back” (6/21/22)
- “AI Is Sparking a Boom in Blue-Collar Jobs…” (6/22/26)
Beyond the dutiful headlines themselves, the editorials also fail to disclose Bezos’ AI ties—which is not unusual. “What the Post’s data-center cheerleading only intermittently mentions is its owner’s vested interest in the topic,” noted Paul Farhi (Washingtonian, 6/23/26), the Post’s former media reporter. “I was unable to find a single editorial or opinion column opposing [AI data centers’] construction over the past six months.”
One of O’Neal’s top deputies, James Hohmann, took things a step further (while also failing to note Bezos’ ties to AI). Hosting an episode (5/26/26) of Opinions’ new flagship podcast, Make It Make Sense—headlined “Why Data Centers Don’t Deserve So Much Hate”—Hohmann “described climate activists as a ‘cult’ and argued that the media is ‘guilty’ of fueling ‘hysteria’ over climate change,” Status (6/7/26) summarized. It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.
Even as Bezos hollows out the rest of the Post, money is flowing to Make It Make Sense, which has a well-appointed new studio. So far, however, “the investment has produced an astonishingly small audience,” Status reported (5/11/26). “It does feel like this is just for an audience of one,” a former Post staffer told the outlet.
Bernie Sanders, ‘Leading Luddite’
As grassroots fights against AI data centers spring up from coast to coast, opposition in the Senate is led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who introduced a bill to place a two-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers.
Already a bête noire of the Post (FAIR.org, 3/8/16), Sanders’ critique of data centers has led to a renewed thrashing. In a March editorial (3/25/26) headlined “Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on His Dumbest Idea,” the Post placed Sanders at “the lunatic fringe” of society for “throwing sand into the gears of progress.” The editorial also called Sanders “the leading Luddite of the 2020s.”
Two weeks later, the Post (4/8/26) returned to the “L” word, this time in an editorial that didn’t mention Sanders, but did associate opposition to data centers with domestic terrorism:
The mob-like movement against data centers that’s been gaining traction across the country took a dark turn this week. Indianapolis Councilor Ron Gibson (D), who supports a project to build such a facility in his district, woke up early Monday to the sound of 13 gunshots fired at his home. The gunman left a note on the lawmaker’s doorstep: “NO DATA CENTERS.”
No one was injured, but the incident illustrates how opposition to artificial intelligence can metastasize into an irrational frenzy. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that deranged Luddites turn to violence to fight the advancement of frontier technology.
Later that month, the Post’s editorial page was back to attacking Sanders. Under a scowling picture of the senator, a Post editorial (4/30/26) charged that Sanders
is as naive now as he was during the Cold War. Rarely, if ever, has the socialist met an enemy of the United States who he doesn’t think he can partner with to advance his agenda. The same impulse that led Sanders to cozy up to the Soviets, the Sandinistas, and Fidel Castro in the 1980s was on display again Wednesday night at the Capitol as he invited two Chinese academics to urge Americans to slow-roll our pursuit of artificial intelligence.
“Of course that’s what Beijing wants Washington to do,” the Post continued, in a brazen attempt to paint skepticism of AI data centers—a view held by most Americans—as anti-American.
The Post’s inflammatory editorial mentioned neither Bezos or Amazon, per usual.
The Billionaire Project
It’s not just Bezos’ financial interests that are advanced by O’Neal’s Opinions page, but also Bezos’ and his fellow billionaires’ broader ideological project (Real News Network, 5/22/26).
Under O’Neal’s watch, no tax on the wealthy seems to go uncensured. “The Post has weighed in on tax policy everywhere from Switzerland to Seattle, lambasting every attempt to reduce the grotesque inequality of our times,” Nathan Robinson wrote in a detailed review of the Post Opinions page for The Nation (4/21/26):
Almost no tax on the rich around the world escapes the paper’s notice—one might wonder why capital gains taxes in the Netherlands are a priority for a DC paper.
And no social program appears too small to earn O’Neal’s ire, not even diapers. In providing 400 free diapers to new parents, “California’s nanny state is taking infantilization to a new level,” decried a Post editorial (5/12/26).
Other recent Post editorials have “opposed minimum wage increases, tenant protections, social housing, rent control, free buses, caps on credit card interest rates, caps on the prices of staple foods, congestion pricing, and even the Railway Safety Act,” wrote Robinson.
But when government largesse flows to the rich, the Post is more open minded. The Trump administration’s request for another $200 billion for the Iran War, as well as a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for next year, both received the Post’s blessing (3/21/26, 5/12/26). “Peace doesn’t come cheap,” the Post wrote.
Left unmentioned in the editorials is that Bezos’ empire—via his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS—holds billions of dollars worth of Pentagon contracts.
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Billionaires' Tax Filings Agree With AOC. They Don't "Earn" Their Billions.
Elon Musk would need to work 58 times longer than the age of the universe to "earn" his wealth.
May 29, 2026
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) kicked off a storm when she said in a podcast interview last week that a person cannot “earn” a billion dollars.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by saying that the statement was “bizarrely foolish” and then pointed to the worst possible example he could think of to counter Ocasio-Cortez’s point: mega-billionaire Elon Musk.
In the eyes of the US government, and specifically the IRS, there’s no question about it. Elon Musk did not “earn” his wealth. Otherwise, he’d be paying a tax rate at least 17 times greater than he is—and generating a tax bill bigger than the GDP of Nevada.
Unless you’re immortal, Ocasio-Cortez is indeed correct that it’s impossible to earn a billion dollars.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
But what if you are Elon Musk? How long would it you take then? A billion years to earn a billion dollars, and 800 billion years to earn $800 billion—so, 58 times longer than the existence of the known universe.
Now that’s bizarre.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
Elon Musk—like Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Elison and many of the world’s other richest men—only “earns” $1 a year. He is what's known as a $1 CEO because he gets paid an annual salary of $1.
What most people don’t realize when we talk about wealth and wealth taxes is that we’re talking about two types of wealth. There’s earned wealth, which is when you get paid for you what you do (eg salaries, wages, etc). And then there’s collected wealth, which is when you get paid for what you own—eg dividends for owning stocks or rent money for owning real estate.
Most people primarily rely on earned wealth for a living. Billionaires on the other hand, their wealth is almost entirely collected wealth.
And that matters, because collected wealth tends to grow a lot faster than earned wealth, but more importantly, because governments tend to tax collected wealth a lot less than earned wealth.
In fact, billionaires very often deliberately reshuffle their wealth around into collected types of wealth specifically to underreport what they “earn” to the IRS and pay less income tax. It’s why Elon Musk can be the world’s richest man on an annual salary of $1. It’s why he and Jeff Bezos have been able to pay zero income taxes in some years while topping the Forbes richest people's list. It's also why Bezos was able to receive a family tax credit for families earning less than $100,000 a year.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Many billionaires aren’t just not earning much, they’re hopelessly in debt—apparently. Many of them are actually living off huge loans that they don’t expect to pay off in their lifetimes. It’s a scheme called “Buy, Borrow, Die.”
Taking their tax allergies to the extreme, rather than selling assets to get the money they need to actually pay for things, some billionaires take out loans against their assets instead. This way, they don’t have to pay the taxes that would have applied if they sold their assets, plus they get to hold on to the assets which can become worth even more over time. And because the money they get this way is technically loan money, it doesn’t count as earned income—and so they can continue to underreport their “earnings” to the IRS and underpay tax.
It might come as a shock to Sen Cruz, but many US billionaires, like his example Elon Musk, have done all they can to “earn” as little to none of their wealth, and some have even gone so far as to “indebt” their billions instead.
But why should we care about any of this?
Because it’s this two-tier tax system that gives special treatment to collected wealth over earned wealth that has allowed the extreme wealth of super-rich individuals to quadruple since the 1980s.
The rise of extreme wealth is directly linked to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt, and to people living shorter lives. A G20 report co-authored by winner of the Nobel prize for economics Joseph Stiglitz warns that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.
What makes wealth taxes so powerful—and so opposed by a vocal minority among the superrich—isn’t just the huge sums of public funds they can bring in. It’s that by specifically taxing collected wealth, wealth taxes directly challenge this two-tier tax system. It’s about protecting economies, people and planet from the harms of extreme wealth.
Whether you’re a wealth earner or a wealth collector, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.
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'Keep Digging': Progressives Welcome Jeff Bezos' Entrance Into Tax-the-Billionaires Debate
"The political danger in Bezos’ argument" to eliminate income taxes for the bottom 50% of American earners, said one op-ed, "is that it lets billionaires sound generous while leaving the structure of wealth largely untouched."
May 22, 2026
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' decision to wade into the tax the rich debate raised eyebrows Thursday, as progressives who have long demanded a wealth tax for billionaires said they'd be happy to include him in the ongoing discussion about how the US tax system can be reformed to benefit working people.
In an interview with CNBC this week, the world's fourth-richest person claimed that doubling his taxes would do nothing to help working people, and attempted to shift the conversation on the tax system to a proposal that the bottom 50% of earners in the US should pay nothing in income taxes.
“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens," said Bezos. "I promise you.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani replied, "I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ." The democratic socialist has been relentlessly focused on making the city more affordable for working people and last month announced his plan to tax second homes valued at more than $5 million.
Critics of Bezos were quick to point out this week that the 1% effective tax rate the billionaire paid between 2014-18 was due to his avoidance of the income tax that working Americans have to pay, with the executive "offsetting earned income with other investment losses and various deductions."
Progressive leaders like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have argued that billionaires including Bezos pay a lower effective tax rate than working people because a vast amount of their wealth comes from unrealized capital gains and other investments instead of income from labor.
Bezos has also not faced a tax on his immense overall wealth of $275.4 billion, which US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives have long called for, saying that taxing a relatively tiny amount of the assets held by billionaires like Bezos, Tesla founder and President Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk, and other tech and business executives could fund essential services for the rest of society—including many that have contributed to the affordability crisis for working families.
"Let's have that debate" regarding reforms to the US tax system, Sanders said Thursday evening, addressing Bezos on Musk's platform X.
The senator has proposed a 5% annual wealth tax, which he said would leave Bezos still sitting on $269 billion in total wealth, while providing enough revenue to fund guaranteed universal childcare, an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for senior citizens, a nationwide starting salary of $60,000 per year for public school teachers, and more.
In his interview with CNBC and on social media this week, Bezos repeatedly attempted to shift attention away from his taxes and onto the income taxes paid by the bottom 50% of earners, claiming that the "top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes."
"The United States has the most progressive tax system in the world," he asserted. "We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group."
Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, who has also called for a wealth tax and last month co-authored a Guardian op-ed with Mamdani explaining how the regressive tax system of the US has helped ensure the top 0.0001% of the global population holds the equivalent of 16% of the world's wealth, said Bezos was misrepresenting the conclusions of global economists regarding the US system.
"Your claim that the top 1% pays 40% of taxes and the bottom 50% only 3% is misleading: It captures just one tax—the federal income tax—and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive," said Zucman.
Bezos continued debating the issue on social media on Wednesday, sharing an article that explained how numerous analyses have determined he has paid an effective tax rate hovering around 1%.
"Great to see Bezos keeps bringing up his own massive tax avoidance. Keep digging! This travesty needs a real public debate," said historian Rutger Bregman, sharing a graph from Zucman's research, which shows how the average tax rate of the richest Americans has plummeted in recent decades.
At Newsweek on Wednesday, the magazine's editors wrote that Bezos was correct in his CNBC interview that "one billionaire's larger tax bill will not fund a modern state by itself."
"The deeper issue is whether the tax system asks comparable civic seriousness from wages, capital gains, inheritances, consumption, and payroll," wrote the editors. "A nurse's paycheck is easy to tax because it is visible. A billionaire's wealth can grow through assets that may remain untaxed until sale, or perhaps sheltered safely in some offshore domain."
"The political danger in Bezos’ argument" to allow the bottom 50% of American earners to pay nothing in income tax, the editors added, "is that it lets billionaires sound generous while leaving the structure of wealth largely untouched."
Thom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report said Bezos' push to eliminate income taxes for a huge swath of Americans benefits him and other billionaires in three ways, while ultimately harming those he claims to be trying to help save money:
First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since [former President Ronald] Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.
Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”
If we just got rid of—or privatized/profitized—all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.
Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.
Hartmann highlighted Bezos' resistance to a wealth tax and a fair tax rate with an anecdote about "a very wealthy German businessman" he once saw interviewed by an American reporter on Bloomberg News.
The businessman asked the reporter "how he could possibly live in a country" that taxes "very wealthy and successful people" at about 60%.
"Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country."
In contrast, Hartmann wrote, "the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks."
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Don't Fall for the Tax Scam Jeff Bezos Is Trying to Peddle
The Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks.
May 22, 2026
The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC earlier this week that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer.
First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.
Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”
If we just got rid of — or privatized/profitized — all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.
Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.
Here’s how it works: If Bezos is paying an Amazon programmer $70,000 a year and that programmer then pays $12,000 a year in income taxes (his example, only for “a nurse in Queens”), their after-tax take-home pay is $58,000. That $58K is what they’re actually living on, and Bezos knows it.
So, if their income tax payment goes away, Bezos can drop their pay from $70K to $58K and they won’t notice any change at all in their lifestyle. And Bezos gets to keep the difference.
But there are even more fundamental problems with Jeff’s little tax scam. Back in 1904, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr famously said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” He was right, and it works in two dimensions.
The main one is that taxes represent the money government must collect to cover the cost of the services its citizens have demanded of their elected representatives. With the exception of emergencies like the Civil War and World War II, the money coming into government and the money spent out should pretty much be in balance. And, with the exception of the period since 1981, they historically have been.
When Ronald Reagan first put into place the GOP’s infamous “Two Santas” strategy of running up the debt during Republican presidencies and squealing about the national debt to block legislation during Democratic presidencies, he broke with an understanding and tradition that dated back to George Washington’s presidency.
Reagan tripled what was left of our WWII national debt, which Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had all paid down to a mere $800 billion by 1981. He deficit-spent like crazy, producing an illusion of good times because of the stimulus of all that purchasing, and left us a $2.4 trillion national debt when he handed the reins of government over to GHW Bush.
While both Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama tried to go along with the GOP and balance or near-balance budgets during their presidencies, the Two Santas spending of GW Bush and Trump has exploded our national debt to $39 trillion, about the same as the sum of all economic activity in the country (our GDP).
As I noted a few weeks ago, if we weren’t paying a trillion dollars a year in just interest on that debt, we could have a national healthcare system and free college education right now.
But keeping us from having nice things — from healthcare to education to housing to an electrified grid — is one of the main goals of the GOP’s Two Santas deficit-spending program.
Each of those programs has to be paid for with tax dollars, and morbidly rich people who are obsessed with making more, more, more want them all killed off.
“We can’t afford it because of the national debt!” is their favorite mantra. “Democrats must shoot their Santa of Social Security and other programs in the face by ‘cutting spending’ before we can talk about taxes!”
The simple reality is that income taxes are largely irrelevant to the lives of working class people. If they got a big tax cut, as noted earlier, their employers would simply reduce their pay to make up for it, or at least freeze it until inflation caught up. If their taxes go up, on the other hand, pressure falls on employers to raise gross (before-tax) pay enough to keep take-home pay where it had been.
Tax increases on working class people, in other words, lead to pay increases, while tax cuts on working class people inevitably lead to pay freezes or cuts, as the history of every tax increase since 1913 and every tax cut since Reagan’s first in 1981 proves.
On the other hand, the rules are completely different for the morbidly rich. If they pay less in taxes, they keep more money for themselves because they’re generally the ones determining how much they take out of their businesses or trust funds, not some employer. When taxes go up, they have less to throw into their money bins.
Which brings up the second and really most important dimension of taxation: it’s supposed to incentivize behaviors society wants and discourage behaviors that harm the rest of us.
When we wanted people to buy cars to increase the mobility of Americans and jump-start the car industry after WWII, we made the interest on car loans tax-deductible. Ditto for house purchases. When the auto industry matured and there was no longer a reason to encourage new car purchases, we did away with that tax deduction.
The things people call “loopholes,” in other words, should be carefully designed to encourage behaviors we want, and historically have been.
We want companies to do research and design to develop new products and make our economy vibrant, so we offer R&D tax deductions. We don’t want companies “making money” by manipulating their own stock prices, so we attach a huge penalty to companies buying back their own stock (or we did until Reagan legalized this form of stock price manipulation in 1983).
And tax rates should be high enough to discourage the kind of hoarding and other antisocial behavior we don’t want rich people engaging in. Prior to Reagan shattering our tax system, people at the top of the economic pyramid generally weren’t in a bizarre competition to amass and display conspicuous levels of wealth.
Certainly, there were dynastic families and people who had fancy houses in the Hamptons, but by and large people with control over their own income (the CEO class) maxxed out their annual take-home around $2 or $3 million because above that the 74-90% tax rate began to bite. The Hearst Castle was the exception that proved the rule; most of the “wealthy” lived in nice suburbs like Beverly Hills and Long Island.
Republicans have been playing cynical tax games with the American public ever since Jude Wanniski invented his Two Santas strategy for the GOP back in the 1970s, and our media generally plays along both to keep in good Republican graces and also because so few people (including reporters) actually understand taxes and taxation theory.
There’s a popular internet meme where an American asks a European, “How can you be happy when you pay so much in taxes?”
The European replies by calmly listing everything those taxes pay for — free health care, free college, inexpensive childcare, quality public transit, a strong social safety net — and then says, “You have to pay a billionaire and his markup for all of those things; we get them for free.”
Similarly, years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV in Asia. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”
“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There are a few wealthy Americans, like Tom Steyer, who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks.
And Jeff Bezos is just the most recent to publicly try to run this scam on us.
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'Bond Villain' Jeff Bezos Claims 'You Could Double the Taxes I Pay' and It Won't Help Anyone
"Too much money contorts any human being," said one critic of the Amazon founder.
May 20, 2026
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos drew ridicule on Wednesday after he claimed that doubling the amount of taxes he pays wouldn't be beneficial to society.
During an interview on CNBC, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Bezos about arguments made by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that the super-rich have lower effective tax rates than average Americans given how much of their wealth comes from unrealized capital gains and not traditional income earned through actual labor.
"I pay billions of dollars in taxes," replied Bezos, whom Forbes estimates is worth $267 billion. "If people want me to pay billions more, then let's have that debate. But don't pretend, you know, that that's going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens, I promise you."
Bezos on CNBC: "You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you." pic.twitter.com/ocbf34XZhA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2026
A 2021 investigation by Pro Publica found that Bezos' effective tax rate of less than 1% between 2014 and 2018, as he paid a total of $973 million in taxes over a period in which his net worth grew by $99 billion.
As explained by the Institute of Taxation and Policy (ITEP), this effective tax rate was "significantly lower" than the tax rate paid by middle-class Americans over that period.
"There were multiple years where Bezos paid nothing at all in income taxes," ITEP noted. "While having billions of dollars of wealth, Bezos consistently avoided income tax by offsetting earned income with other investment losses and various deductions, all while Amazon stock was rapidly rising."
Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros in Colorado suggested Bezos had a point about taxation—"because we tax income, not wealth.
"Bezos takes out a tiny salary, pays the income tax, and lives off loans borrowed against his stocks, basically tax-free," said Kiros. "They all do this and now 935 billionaires hold more wealth than 170 million Americans. It’s time to tax wealth."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, took issue with Bezos' claim that doubling his taxes would produce no benefits.
"Jeff Bezos paid $500 million for his super-yacht and $75 million for his super-yacht’s mini-yacht—both of which he’s allowed to write off on his taxes," she wrote in a social media post. "That alone would cover $180 in classroom supplies for every public school teacher in the US."
Craig Harrington, research director at Media Matters for America, marveled at how out of touch Bezos seemed to be.
"There’s a funny thing about being uber wealthy," he observed. "They get so rich that they lose all sense of place, they essentially manifest as stateless people with no connection to or understanding of the world outside their private airports and resplendent villas."
Journalist and screenwriter David Simon expressed a similar view of the impact of immense wealth on Bezos' psyche.
"Too much money contorts any human being," Simon wrote. "And what was once a man is now, for the rest of the world, a fully metastasized cancer."
Author Hemant Mehta, meanwhile, simply wondered if Bezos "auditioning to be the next Bond villain."
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'Are Readers Meant to Take This Seriously?': Economist Refutes Latest Attack on Wealth Tax by Bezos' Washington Post
"Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us," said Emmanuel Saez, the French economist who designed California's wealth tax proposal.
May 07, 2026
The architect of California's wealth tax proposal called out The Washington Post and its multibillionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Thursday for peddling what he said is "misinformation" to readers.
Emmanuel Saez, a French economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was tapped by California's largest union to design the tax proposal, singled out an opinion piece by the Washington Post editorial board from earlier this week that argues the proposal would backfire and cost California billions of dollars in tax revenue each year.
Saez said the article contains glaring falsehoods and omits key information about the proposal, which aims to create a one-time tax of 5% on the total assets of California's roughly 200 billionaire residents in order to recoup about $100 billion in revenue for healthcare, food assistance, and education stripped from the state by last year's Republican federal budget legislation, which will hand $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the next 10 years.
The piece, published on Monday with the headline "California already losing with billionaire tax referendum," argues that even if California voters don't ultimately approve the measure, "the specter of such a wealth tax has already cost the state more in lost future revenue from income taxes than it would raise" due to an exodus of wealthy people from the state—an oft-used but weakly substantiated talking point by opponents of the measure.
The Post cited a paper by Jared Walczak, a visiting fellow at the California Tax Foundation, which it said demonstrates that billionaire flight "will cost California’s state government somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion every year in other tax collections, and up to $19 billion in lost [gross domestic product]."
But Saez argued that his study makes a "basic mistake" by "modeling a mobility response of billionaires to a permanent annual and recurrent 5% wealth tax." In reality, though, the tax would be imposed only once and would apply to any billionaires who resided in the state after January 1, 2026, which has already passed, so it no longer creates an incentive to move.
Saez argued that in any case, "Walczak’s estimation of the California income tax paid by billionaires who have threatened to leave is also wildly exaggerated."
Walczak's figure for lost tax revenue, he said, hinges on the idea that the three richest men who've threatened to leave the state, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pay $1.7 billion in California income taxes each year.
"If only they paid so much!" Saez quipped.
"In reality, using Securities and Exchange Commission data on stock sales, stock donations, dividends, and executive compensation, we can directly estimate that they paid only [$269 million] in California income tax in 2025, 6.3 times less than Walczak’s assumption," he said, citing a paper he co-wrote in March responding to a similar argument by a conservative think tank.
He cited tax data showing that the tech tycoons—who own a combined $810 billion according to Forbes—only collectively paid about [$22 million] per year on average between 2019-25, with Brin and Page paying no taxes on their wealth from stock in Google's parent company Alphabet during three of those years because they didn't sell stock, get dividends, or receive executive compensation. This is despite 90% of their wealth coming from those holdings.
"The one-time wealth tax finally makes them contribute in proportion to their enormous wealth gains," Saez said.
The Post also claimed that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, the union leading the charge in support of the referendum, is "pretend[ing] that the tax is needed to save California’s health system from 'collapse'" and is instead dishonestly using that framing to covertly pursue the "redistribution of wealth."
But Saez said that the federal cuts of roughly $20 billion annually are already having devastating effects on Californians that could be alleviated with more tax revenue.
As a result of the cuts, "more than 400 California hospitals have already laid off more than 3,400 healthcare workers as of mid-March, with a second wave of layoffs expected as funding cuts tied to recent federal policy changes are phased in over the next several years," he said. "Statewide, projections show the cuts could result in the loss of up to 145,000 healthcare jobs, impacting hospitals, clinics, and home care providers alike."
Eighty-three more hospitals in California may be at risk of closing due to the federal funding cuts, according to a recent nationwide analysis by Public Citizen. But Saez said the billionaire's tax would go a long way toward closing the gap.
"Right now, California’s billionaires pay much lower tax rates than what working families pay out of every paycheck," Saez said.
Despite claims otherwise by the Post editorial board—which last month ran another piece arguing that due to progressive taxation, "the rich already pay more than their fair share"—according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, at all levels of government from 2018-20, billionaires paid just 24% of their total income in taxes, while the US-wide average was 30%. This disparity arises largely due to loopholes that allow the rich to avoid taxes on business and investment gains that are not sold.
"Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us," Saez said.
Debru Carthan, the executive vice president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, said it was not surprising that the Post "completely ignores that the billionaire tax would keep hospitals from closing and healthcare costs from skyrocketing for millions of Californians" because it is "a crisis that comes as a direct result of the tax breaks handed out to Jeff Bezos and his buddies."
Since the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, the Amazon founder has taken a much heavier hand over the content of his flagship paper, including its opinion section, which he last year mandated to exclusively publish pieces on economics that promote “personal liberties and free markets," leading to the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley.
But Saez marveled at how blatant Bezos' thumb on the scale has appeared in his paper's coverage of California's billionaire wealth tax and similar proposals, which it has denounced on several other occasions.
“Are readers meant to take this seriously?" Saez asked. "‘Board of billionaire-owned paper comes out against tax on billionaires’? Everyone knows this board makes political decisions at the behest of Jeff Bezos, but this one is the most transparent of them all."
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A Four-Word Response for Those Upset With Jeff Bezos for Any Number of Reasons: 'Tax the Damn Rich'
Sen. Bernie Sanders noted that the billionaire spent $10 million on the Met Gala, $120 million on a penthouse, and $500 million on a yacht while "planning to throw 600,000 Amazon workers out on the streets and replace them with robots."
May 05, 2026
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in recent weeks has come under fire for a wide variety of reasons, including his involvement with the 2026 Met Gala and his plans to build a robot workforce.
A Monday report from The Hollywood Reporter noted that Bezos, despite being a lead sponsor of this year's Met Gala, did not make an appearance at the event's red carpet as he had in past years.
Bezos' sponsorship of the Gala has been hit with heavy criticism in recent weeks, as many activists slammed the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for taking the tech mogul's money despite his company's labor practices and reported involvement in helping US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, other critics "accused the billionaire of buying influence with the major event and speculation swirled that some stars may boycott the event due to his involvement."
In addition to not appearing at the Met Gala red carpet, Bezos is reportedly trying to lower his profile by selling his $500 million luxury yacht.
The New York Post reported on Monday that Bezos has decided that the 417-foot vessel has become "too recognizable," and is also a headache to maintain, costing an estimated $30 million per year to operate.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday argued that Bezos' lavish spending and his plan to build an army of robots to replace human workers was symbolic of American capitalism in 2026.
"The reality of American life today," Sanders wrote in a social media post. "Jeff Bezos, worth $290 billion, spent: $10 million on the Met Gala, $120 million on a penthouse, $500 million on a yacht. Meanwhile, he‘s planning to throw 600,000 Amazon workers out on the streets and replace them with robots. Unacceptable."
Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director, similarly made the case that Bezos' spending spree was yet another argument for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
"Jeff Bezos, who paid $10 million for the Met Gala," Gunnels wrote, "got $62 billion richer since [President Donald] Trump was elected and spent $500 million on a yacht to sail to his $55 million wedding in Venice to give his wife a $5 million ring because his tax rate is less than 1%. Four words: Tax the damn rich."
Labor unions, which have long clashed with Bezos over Amazon's aggressive union-busting tactics, held their own rival "Ball Without Billionaires" on Monday evening to protest the Bezos-funded Met Gala.
As reported by Democracy Now!, the gala featured "Amazon, Whole Foods, Washington Post, Starbucks, and Uber workers" who "walked the runway in looks by immigrant designers."
April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said the Ball Without Billionaires was "not just about fashion" but "about power" and "telling the truth that people who sew and care and drive and cook and clean and secure and those that create are the ones who make everything possible."
Workers at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, who earlier this year voted to unionize, registered their own disapproval of this year's Met Gala, posting a message on Instagram informing followers that "91% of hourly Met staff in our unit earn less than a living wage."
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‘Worst Conceivable Representative’: Inequality Opponents Condemn Bezos Sponsorship of Met Gala
"It's a thin line between celebrating glamor and artwashing extreme wealth," said the Tax Justice Network.
May 04, 2026
As celebrities prepared to attend the 2026 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Monday, a coalition of nearly three dozen civil society groups warned that with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—currently the fourth-richest person on Earth—chairing the annual fundraiser, the gala risks "artwashing the harms of extreme wealth."
Groups including Greenpeace International, Patriotic Millionaires, and War on Want signed a letter organized by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, calling on the museum and Vogue magazine, which hosts the event, not to honor Bezos and warning that the billionaire is using the two cultural institutions as tools "to launder his public image."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a celebrated collection of art spanning centuries, many of it made "in defiance of power—work that exposed injustice, gave voice to the silenced, and held the powerful to account," reads the letter.
But the tech mogul chosen to chair the gala "has made his loyalties clear" since President Donald Trump first took office in 2017 and during the Republican's second term, said the groups, pointing to Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post, the mass firing of hundreds of the newspaper's reporters this year, and his remaking of the publication's opinion section into one focusing on "free markets."
He "gutted" the Post "while reportedly pouring $75 million into a film promoting Melania Trump," reads the letter, referring to the Amazon-produced documentary film Melania.
"A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes."
"He is not just a bystander to Trump’s administration," wrote the organizations. "He is one of its enablers. This is not philanthropy. This effectively is influence bought and paid for by Bezos’ pocket change—and the Met Gala is his latest purchase."
The groups added that in addition to aligning himself with the White House through his ownership of the Post, Bezos and Amazon—a government contractor where he is still the largest individual shareholder—is working with Trump to "make possible a concentration of power that not only threatens lives in the US but across the world as well."
"While so many of these policies aren’t new, they have been exacerbated under Trump and with the help of people like Bezos—from families torn apart by ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids reportedly enabled by Amazon's own technology, to a White House emboldened to threaten and carry out military action against sovereign nations without consequence—including to ‘destroy a whole civilization’ in Iran—with no accountability," reads the letter.
The Tax Justice Network, one of the signatories, emphasized that just a fraction of the money that goes to the $100,000-per ticket Met Gala could alleviate the economic inequality that's grown worse under the Trump administration.
"A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes," said the Tax Justice Network, citing its analysis released Monday.
Bezos is among the billionaires who have contributed donations to Trump's pet projects—a luxury ballroom and a 250-foot-tall arch in Washington, DC—while the president has tried to cut the home energy assistance program, said the group.
“There’s a thin line between celebrating glamorous fashion and artwashing extreme wealth, and that line gets bulldozed when your poster boy is an ICE-profiteering billionaire bankrolling Trump’s vanity projects and a top spender on anti-worker lobbying,” said Alex Cobham, chief executive at the Tax Justice Network.
In the first two hours of the Met Gala, Cobham added, "Bezos’s wealth will grow by the equivalent of 130,000 hours of a teacher’s labor... This extreme distortion throws economies out of whack. Our economies are supposed to let people earn the wealth they need to lead secure and comfortable lives, but most countries’ tax rules make it easier for the superrich to collect wealth than for the rest of us to earn it."
It's a thin line between celebrating glamor & artwashing extreme wealth. That line gets bulldozed when your patron is an ICE-profiteering billionaire bankrolling Trump’s vanity projects & a top spender on antiworker lobbying. Don't let Bezos artwash his at the Met Gala taxjustice.net/press/2-tax-...
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— Tax Justice Network (@taxjustice.net) May 4, 2026 at 3:25 AM
"In Bezos’ case, it’s easy to see how that undertaxed collected wealth goes towards lobbying further against workers’ rights and pay, while his company Amazon remains one of the biggest recipients of US subsidies," said Cobham.
According to the Tax Justice Network's analysis, Bezos accumulated $3.8 million every house from 2023-25, when his total wealth grew by more than $100 billion.
"If Bezos were to continue to accumulate wealth at this rate," said the group, "he would accumulate $7.6 million in the first two hours of the Met Gala event, which is the equivalent of 110 NYC Public Schools teachers’ starting salaries"—$68,902.
Those organizing the gala can and must "stop celebrating those destroying our countries and humanity itself," reads the letter sent by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, by not honoring Bezos and backing the fair taxation of the wealthiest households and corporations.
"End the oligarchy," reads the letter. "Tax the super rich. Now."
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a proponent of taxing the rich to pay for crucial public programs and services, planned to skip the Met Gala in a break with tradition. Last month Mamdani announced plans for a tax on second homes valued at $5 million or more in New York City.
Celebrities who are reportedly planning to skip the event include Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid, who has spoken out against ICE and in favor of Palestinian rights, and actress Zendaya.
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