Dave: “Hello, caller, you are on the air.”
Caller: “I don’t think billionaires create value.”
Dave: “Okay. What do you mean by that?”
Caller: “Nobody can earn a billion dollars ethically.”
Dave: “Alright. What do you do for a living?”
Caller: “Well, before this, I was a bartender.”
Dave: “Nothing wrong with bartending. Honest work.”
Caller: “Right.”
Dave: “And now?”
Caller: “I work in government.”
Dave: “Okay. So let me get this straight. You're saying Elon Musk, who helped build PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink, has made innovations like online payments, electric cars, rockets, and satellite internet possible, didn't earn his way to being a billionaire?"
Caller: “None of that justifies being a billionaire.”
Dave: “Well, sure sounds like value got created somewhere along the line.”
Caller: “I disagree.”
Dave: “What exactly did you build?”
Caller: “I advocate for economic justice.”
Dave: “No ma’am, I mean actual products.”
Caller: “…”
Dave: “You’re telling me the guy catching rockets mid-air created less value than a person who used to serve mojitos and now votes on spending his tax dollars?”
Caller: “That’s unfair.”
Dave: “What’s unfair is pretending markets are imaginary while cashing a government paycheck funded by the businesses you claim don’t create value.”
Caller: “I’m actually a congresswoman.”
Dave: “Oh Lord. Of course!"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You can't earn a billion dollars.
Ilana Glazer: That's right.
AOC: You just can't earn that.
Glazer: That's exactly correct.
AOC: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.
Glazer: Yup.
AOC: You can pay people less than what they're worth.
Glazer: Yup.
AOC: But you can't earn that, right?
Glazer: That's right.
AOC: And so you have to create a myth that -- since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.