AOC Mocked After She Claims No One Can ‘Earn a Billion Dollars’: ‘Her entire salary is stolen from people’
8th May 2026
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been roundly scorned after she claimed on a podcast this week that the idea anyone can earn their way to billionaire status is a “myth.”
“You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that,” the Bronx and Queens rep told comedian Ilana Glazer on Thursday on the latter’s podcast, “It’s Open.” “You can get market power, you can break rules, you can do all sorts of things.
“You can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth that — since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.”
AOC doubled down in a post on X Thursday evening, writing: “The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers … Some people get enraged that I draw attention to this. That’s on them. Let them call me shrill, dumb, inexperienced, girly, uneducated – these folks will say anything to distract from or undercut the truth that working people are getting screwed, and giving people a fair shake means we must have a grown conversation about reigning [sic] in abuse of power.”