alt Hacker NewsI think there's a bit of nuance here. AOC is directionally correct, but of course there's exceptions.
I do think Taylor Swift and JK Rowling "earned" a billion dollars.
I don't think Elon Musk or Donald Trump "earned" their wealth.
Elon, for example, did earn a lot of it. People gave him money for Teslas.
But he disproportionally makes profit off regulatory credits, selling his own companies to each other, and burdening his companies with debt. He's forced people to work through pandemics, undermined the SEC, stolen data from the government, bought elections, and (if you want to believe recent stories) may have even helped cheat in the most recent presidential election. He directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to DOGE budget cuts, all while getting billions of dollars worth of contracts via SpaceX and xAI.
Or Bezos. Amazon uses our roads and infrastructure. A majority of Amazon warehouse workers rely on public assistance. I believe Bezos is a phenomenal founder, but his returns have subsidized by us.
There's a reason Taylor Swift doesn't get brought up when people talk about the rich. You _can_ earn a billion dollars, but more often than not you have to screw over a lot of people to get there.
I don't understand this dichotomy between the people you've mentioned—nobody makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a vacuum by themselves. Swift had her parents, staff, record companies that helped push and advertise her and rowling has a similar story.
That and Taylor does get brought up the whole time for being rich and wasteful, I can't count how many times I've heard about her incredibly short private jet trips in the past few years.
Your criticism of Bezos are also a bit ridiculous. Nearly every company that isn't B2B SaaS junk uses roads in some degree. I fail to see how the warehouse workers being on public assistance have anything to do with Bezos—if you wanted them to be self sufficient a politician could increase the minimum wage.
Your criticisms of Musk dishonest, but I would also argue that he didn't "earn" a lot of the money for Tesla, as he's just a jackass with a bachelors in econ that did none of the work on it.
AOC/Bernie types have never been directionally correct, as allowing the government to rob you in America will usually not correlate with any increase in QoL for the general populace. Someone on here described taxes in America and Western countries as "tithes" like you would pay to the mafia as "protection" money, where every dollar you give them makes them more capable of extorting the next one out of you.