Jeff Bezos has defended extreme wealth, arguing that success should not be treated as inherently wrong, while acknowledging that many young Americans face serious problems with housing affordability.
The Amazon founder, whose net worth is given as $372 billion, said people had been taught to view society through an “oppressor/oppressed framework” in which success was equated with villainy.
“Success is not villainy. You can be a billionaire if you started a hamburger stand,” Bezos told Fox News.
He described a hypothetical business that began with a simple food stand and about 10 employees before expanding into thousands of sites and employing many more people.
“There’s nothing wrong with making unbelievably good chicken that people love. And it doesn’t make him a bad person,” he said.
Jeff Bezos says affordability, not blame, should be the focus
Bezos’s argument comes as attitudes towards billionaire wealth remain particularly sceptical among younger Americans. A 2025 Pew Research study found that 18 per cent of Americans viewed being extremely rich as morally wrong, rising to about 33 per cent among Gen Z adults aged 18 to 29.
The fortunes of the world’s billionaires reached a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, according to Oxfam, while home ownership has increasingly appeared out of reach for many younger households struggling with housing costs.
Bezos acknowledged the scale of the affordability problem but said politicians should concentrate on addressing its causes rather than assigning blame.
“Young people look at the cost of housing and think, I have to live two hours out of town. I can’t live close to my job,” he said.
He compared that approach with the standards he expects from executives at Amazon, Blue Origin and Prometheus, his companies.
“If there’s somebody at Amazon or Blue Origin or Prometheus, an executive at one of my companies, instead of working on a root cause and a real fix, all they did is point fingers and blame people, we would exit them quickly,” Bezos said. “They wouldn’t be here long.”
Earlier this year, Bezos proposed removing federal income tax for the bottom half of US income earners, which he estimated represented about 76 million households.
“The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes,” he told CNBC in May. “I think it should be zero.”
He cited the example of a healthcare worker in Queens earning $75,000 a year but paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes.
“We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology. It really makes no sense,” Bezos said.
Other wealthy business leaders have also rejected the idea that riches should automatically be viewed as evidence of wrongdoing. Former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, who is said to have a fortune of about $3.4 billion, told a US Senate committee in 2023 that he had grown up in federally subsidised housing and had earned his wealth.
Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive whose net worth is given as about $3 billion, has similarly acknowledged concerns about inequality while opposing blanket criticism of wealthy people.
“I think you should vilify Nazis, but you shouldn’t vilify people who’ve worked hard to accomplish things,” Dimon told 60 Minutes in 2019.
