“I Don’t Think We Should Have Billionaires.”
What’s more important: a 417 foot yacht or one hundred thousand human lives?
Zohran Mamdani doesn’t think there should be billionaires.1 That’s what he said during a recent interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
And with how Bill Ackman, Michael Bloomberg, and John Catsimatidis have reacted to his candidacy, I for one can’t blame him. (He’s really been learning his billionaire ABCs.)
Now, the discourse after someone says billionaires shouldn’t exist typically devolves rather quickly to a discussion of incentives, that word which has long served as the universal sign someone fancies themselves an economist. This go-round isn’t any different.
See an exemplary post from Reason magazine reporter Billy Binion below:
Now, I am personally fairly skeptical increasing taxes on multimillionaires and billionaires would do all that much to reduce the rate of business formation, or even necessarily lead to enough capital flight to reduce total tax revenue (see Medlock 2024). Frankly, the number of people who would start a business if they knew they could make over $1 billion, but not if they could “only” make $999 million just seems pretty likely to be a big ol’ goose egg to me.
But let’s just leave the discussion of incentives for economists far smarter than me and more well versed in the relevant literature. Without considering public policy at all, should billionaires exist?
I’ll begin by making the following assumptions:
People have a right to ensure that they live comfortable lives.
People have a right to help their family live comfortable lives.
It is generally okay for someone to prioritize economic security for themselves and their family over other people.
An innocent person dying a preventable death is bad.
Helping prevent someone from dying is good.
Addendum, if you can prevent someone from dying with negligible cost to yourself, it is actually bad not to do so. (Barring exceptional extenuating circumstances I won’t discuss here.)
And saving the lives of many people is “more good” than marginally improving the life of one person.
Alright. Hopefully you don’t find those assumptions too egregious. So now let’s make use of a thankfully convenient “ripped from the headlines” example.
The numbers floating around seem to be that Jeff Bezos spent $500 million on his shiny new 417ft superyacht, the Koru, and $75 million on the “support vessel,” the Abeona. Yearly upkeep costs for both ships are reportedly in the ballpark of $30 million.
In the past GiveWell, the preeminent charity evaluator/aggregator, has typically estimated saving a human life has “an average cost between $3,000 and $5,500.”2
Taking the high end of that estimate to be (methodologically) conservative, the amount of money Bezos spent on the Koru and the Abeona could instead have saved over 100,000 lives.3
Purchasing those yachts was simply a monstrous decision. Without any reference to what Bezos did to get his hundreds of billions, my assumptions ought lead us invariably to that conclusion.
Now, I’m sure the Koru is a lovely vessel. After all, Architectural Digest contributor Elizabeth Stamp wrote that it has “three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool.” (Presumably so that when Bezos tires of one Jacuzzi but still desires those wondrous bubbles, he has a choice of where to go next.) But having the world’s largest yacht did not meaningfully improve Bezos’ life. If he’d instead bought a mere 260ft yacht for a piddling $75 million, I imagine he could host just as many Eyes Wide Shut-style bacchanals.
And the difference between that $75 million yacht and the $575 million super yacht and support vessel combo Bezos actually bought is very conservatively 90 thousand lives.
Consciously or not, Bezos chose between saving many thousands of people from needless, likely painful early deaths and getting to boast about having a real big ship. And he chose the ship. He is a monster.
Basically every billionaire, by dint of retaining their billions, makes the same choice every time they buy a new mansion or whatever else folks with more money than sense splurge on. (N.B.: There are some exceptions to this rule even though others have problems with billionaire backed philanthropy.)
“Aha!” My imaginary uncharitable interlocutor might now exclaim. “Americans are far wealthier than the vast majority of the world’s population, so doesn’t your argument imply that every American family should donate the vast majority of their wealth?” (The interlocutor has been here the entire time; they were just silent until now.)
Which is where I could simply point to assumptions 1, 2, and 3 before justifiably proceeding to ignore them. But to be more specific, I will concede that it seems perfectly reasonable to believe it is fine, good even, to save money and property up to some upper limit where you and all your loved ones can be assured that you will all live comfortably ever after. That threshold though is far, far, far below $1 billion.
Let’s say you become a multimillionaire with a sizable fortune of some $50 million following a ridiculously lucky streak in Vegas (don’t gamble kids). By being prudent and placing those millions in U.S. Treasuries, you could get an annual yield of somewhere north of 4 percent at the time of writing. So just by putting your fortune into Treasuries, which were essentially risk-free until recently, you would have a tidy annual income of some $2 million. Not shabby.
And assuming you have three children and a spouse all likely to survive you, your fortune could be split four ways upon your passing while still leaving all your immediate family independently wealthy (with individual incomes near the 98th percentile or so of the American income distribution).
Of course, the preceding thought exercise shouldn’t be taken to suggest that the average American oughtn’t donate far more of their income. Less than half of all Americans donate to charity and those who do only donate around 4 percent of their income according to one report. Plainly, the world would be in a much better place if non-impoverished families took some inspiration from religious practices and “tithed” ten percent of their income to effective charities.
But it hopefully helped illustrate that anyone would be able to ensure a more than comfortable life for themselves, their children, and their spouse with a twentieth of $1 billion. To accumulate and to hoard not just twenty times that $50 million fortune, but over seven thousand times as much—to take Elon Musk as of June 2025 as an example—when every additional five grand could have been used to save a life is a moral crime beyond comprehension.
In short, I don’t think we should have billionaires either. And you hardly need to be a socialist to believe so.
Don’t worry, this Substack won’t be a Zohran fan account in perpetuum. He’s just the candidate raising interesting questions about policy, politics, etc. right now.
Donations to animal welfare charities can also be ridiculously “efficient” but I’ll set those aside for the purposes of this post.
Maybe the programs GiveWell touts wouldn’t scale as efficiently as one might hope, but they do already direct hundreds of millions of dollars in donations every year.