Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said that increasing taxes on billionaires wouldn’t meaningfully improve life for ordinary Americans, as NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes to raise income taxes on the city’s highest earners.
Speaking to CNBC yesterday (May 20), the billionaire argued that elected officials are too quick to paint extremely wealthy people as the problem.
Bezos suggested tax debates are being used to create division and shift attention away from what he sees as the country’s larger issues.
“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you,” he said in the interview.
Mamdani, who has been advocating for higher taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, responded soon after.
“I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ,” he wrote on X.
While Bezos said he recognizes that income inequality is a real concern in the US, he maintained that higher taxes on the richest Americans aren’t the solution.
He described the situation as an economy split between people who are thriving and people who are struggling.
“I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies – so you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling.
“So what’s happening here is, politicians are using the kind of age old technique … you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers.”
Bezos, 62, is currently listed by Forbes as the fourth-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $272 billion.
Most of that wealth is connected to his Amazon stake, along with holdings tied to Blue Origin and The Washington Post.
During the discussion, Bezos also pointed to how much of the country’s tax intake he says comes from the highest earners.
Bezos claimed: “The top one percent of taxpayers pay about 40 percent of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay percent.”
Even as he argued against raising taxes on the wealthy, Bezos questioned the idea of lower-income workers paying taxes at all.
“How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes?,” he said, without specifying which type of tax he meant.
In New York, Mamdani recently outlined a proposed “pied-à-terre” tax that would target residential property owners who don’t live in the city full time.
In a video that has since spread widely online, Mamdani highlighted a series of luxury Manhattan apartments, including some reportedly valued as high as $238 million.