“I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble,” former Vice President Joe Biden told an audience at the Brookings Institute in 2018. It was a few months before he’d officially declare his candidacy for president, but Biden’s position was clear: “The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
After Bernie Sanders said that “Billionaires should not exist” during a 2019 New York Times interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, himself worth approximately $80 billion, took pains to defend the supposed goodness of the ultra-wealthy, including in a live-streamed employee Q&A at Facebook and on Fox Business News.