Zohram Mamdani is turning out to be every bit the socialist know-nothing that many of us on the right predicted he would be. His snarky response to a video of Jeff Bezos today is a case in point.
The clip was pulled by “journalist” Aaron Rupar and it shows Jeff Bezos defending the amount of money he pays in taxes.
Bezos on CNBC: “You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.” pic.twitter.com/ocbf34XZhA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2026
Here’s the key bit:
Bezos: I pay billions of dollars in taxes. Again, if people want me to pay more billions then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend that that’s going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you…You can’t connect those two things, not logically.
Mamdani jumped on the clip with this snarky, socialist response.
I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ. https://t.co/JEnRnM2xII
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) May 20, 2026
This plays as a kind of vague insult and insinuation that Jeff Bezos doesn’t know any real Americans, but that’s all it does. On the substance, Bezos is undeniably correct. Just consider this logically for a moment.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t live in New York, he lives in Florida. He does however own a big penthouse and a few more properties in a building in New York City. So he’s probably paying some significant property taxes there and he’ll pay even more under Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax.
However, that’s not the kind of taxes the interview was asking about. The question was about federal taxes which is where most people pay the bulk of their taxes each year. Obviously we don’t know exactly what Bezos or anyone else paid in taxes last year because that information is private. What we do know is that his wealth is tied up in his ownership of Amazon. So when he sells stock in order to realize gains, he pays a certain percentage of those gains in taxes. So you can get a rough idea of what Bezos paid in a given year by looking at how much stock he sold.
In 2024, Forbes estimated that Bezos paid about $2.7 billion in taxes.
The world’s fourth-richest man—now worth an estimated $231 billion—likely paid some $2.7 billion in taxes in 2024, per Forbes estimates. The lion’s share of that tax bill is the result of Bezos’ record year of share sales: he offloaded $13.6 billion worth of Amazon stock as the e-commerce giant’s share price soared 46% and pushed Bezos’ net worth to an all-time high.
What happens to the imaginary teacher in Queens if we double the amount of federal taxes Jeff Bezos pays? The answer is absolutely nothing. In fact, forget doubling it, let’s make Bezos pay 10 times as much. So imagine that his tax bill for last year jumped from $2.7 billion to $27 billion.
All of that money would go to the IRS where it would be used to pay the federal government’s bills. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the federal government has been outspending what it brings in via taxes every year. Last year the deficit at the federal level was roughly $1.8 trillion. You could write that as $1,800 billion. So what would happen to Bezos $27 billion contribution? It would disappear and, at best, our federal deficit would drop from $1,800 billion to $1,773 billion.
Would that drop be perceptible to anyone? Probably not.
As for the teacher in Queens, she would still be making the same salary. Her rent would be unchanged. The cost of groceries would not change. Multiplying Bezos’ taxes by 10X would make zero difference to her life. As Bezos said, you can’t connect those two things logically.
If we had journalists who were not left-wing shills, one of them would ask Mamdani how doubling Bezos’ taxes would help those teachers. I’m quite certain he doesn’t have an answer for that, which is why no one in the media will ask.
Better yet, someone should track down Mamdani’s teacher friends in Queens and ask them to explain how doubling or quadrupling or 10Xing Bezos’ taxes would help them. But again, no one is going to do that even assuming those people exist.
The real point of Mamdani’s snarky comment is to signal that he’s all in on socialism. The fact that his comment makes no sense won’t matter to him, to his fans in NYC or to 90% of the media. He is counting on people not knowing any better.
I’ll give Bezos the last word. This is him dunking on New York City’s spending on schools from the same interview. It may explain why Mayor Mamdani is looking to clap back as the kids say.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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