When Zohran Mamdani declared on Meet the Press that “we shouldn’t have billionaires,” the backlash was swift. Wealthy elites and their defenders rushed to paint billionaires as indispensable benefactors. Hedge fund titan Bill Ackman insisted Mamdani had it completely wrong, claiming that helping the poor and needy depends entirely on the generosity of New York City’s wealthy residents (in the form of tax revenues).

Ackman is apparently so concerned about the fate of these needy New Yorkers that he and his friends are prepared to spend “hundreds of millions of dollars” on a general election campaign against the thirty-three -year-old democratic socialist. Trump himself claimed that he will “save New York City” from Mamdani — and threatened to arrest him.

There is a stubborn belief that billionaires are good for society: that their wealth benefits everyone, that they spur innovation, and that they’ve earned it. As a result, many see Jeff Bezos’s $500 million yacht sailing into Venice as a reasonable display of success. And many contend that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — a sweeping tax cut for the wealthy paid for by the poorest Americans — is legitimately concerned with “all hard-working Americans,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson put it.