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California billionaire and gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer avoided directly answering whether he agreed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., comments on wealthy people.
“She said, ‘No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,'” journalist Mehdi Hasan asked Steyer on his show “Mehdi Unfiltered” Monday. “She basically argued that billionaires in this country exploit low-wage labor working people to get where they got to. Do you agree with her?”
“Well, let me start by saying something, just so you can turn the dial down a little,” Steyer responded. “My wife, Kat Taylor, and I have pledged to give the bulk of our money away while we’re alive. And we’re doing that. I do believe that we have far too much inequality.”
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that billionaires can’t “earn” a billion dollars without abusing the law. (Reuters/Jeenah Moon)
He continued, “But the truth is the reason I started a business and made a bunch of money and walked away from it 14 years ago, and I’ve said we’re going to give the bulk of that money away to support progressive causes, to support working people and to support protecting the environment.”
Steyer reiterated his belief that billionaires like himself should be paying more in taxes, though he did not clarify whether he believed that their wealth was rightfully earned.
He also conceded that many Democrats might not want a billionaire governor but argued that Californians “want someone who will stand up to billionaires and who will stand up to corporations.”
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Tom Steyer is one of several candidates running for California governor. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
“I’m the only billionaire on the ballot, but I am very far from the only billionaire in this race. There are corporations and billionaires putting tens of millions of dollars into this race,” Steyer said.
Fox News Digital reached out to Steyer’s campaign for comment.
Ocasio-Cortez faced backlash last week after claiming that billionaires cannot “earn” their wealth without abusing laws.
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“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday. “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…you have to create a myth of earning it.”
Tom Steyer argued that he was the only candidate who could stand up to billionaires and corporations. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)
She has since doubled and tripled down on the stance, going as far as to claim that the American Revolution was against the “billionaires of their time.”
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“The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers,” she wrote on X. “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 in abuse of power.”