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Without making any value judgement, there’s a very clear distinction between earning wages as compensation for labor (even very high wages) and increasing your net worth through ownership of a company. That’s a valid distinction no matter how hard the second person works.

I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.

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Depends on what you mean by wages. Floyd Mayweather Jr.‘s career earnings are over 1 billion. Celebrities can get extremely high compensation packages especially when you adjust for inflation without an ownership stake in anything. Finance can be similarly well compensated at the very top.

Often very high compensation packages happen to include shares, but that’s just the form of compensation not an inherent requirement. Of course all paths to a billion dollars are so unlikely it’s really not a reasonable target unless you have already passed most significant hurdles.

> I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.

Non-founders CEOs have done this, like Tim Cook. Also, Taylor Swift.

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