Mark Zuckerberg says billionaires don’t deserve that much money

Mark Zuckerberg, who has a net worth of $66.6 billion, says billionaires don’t deserve to have that much money. 

The Facebook CEO made the comments during a Q&A Facebook livestream with employees on Thursday. 

His take on billionaires came after he was asked to respond to recent comments made by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders that so much wealth for one person shouldn’t exist.

Zuckerberg, who is the fifth richest person in the world, said he agreed with Sanders. 

‘I understand where he’s coming from,’ he said. 

‘I don’t know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have but on some level no one deserves to have that much money.’ 

Sanders announced last month a plan to tax the nation’s wealthiest households, saying it will generate more than $4 trillion over the next decade and substantially reduce billionaires’ fortunes.

The plan unveiled by Sanders seeks a 1 percent levy on households worth more than $32 million and proposes tax rates that would increase for wealthier people, up to 8 percent for $10 billion-plus fortunes.

‘We are going to take on the billionaire class, substantially reduce wealth inequality in America and stop our democracy from turning into a corrupt oligarchy,’ Sanders said at the time. 

Sanders has also previously vowed to clamp down on media mergers and toughen enforcement of antitrust laws against tech giants like Facebook and Google. 

His take on billionaires came after he was asked to respond to recent comments made by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders that so much wealth for one person shouldn’t exist

It comes just days after audio of two internal Facebook company meetings from July were published by The Verge in which Zuckerberg told employees that Sanders’ rival, Elizabeth Warren, becoming president would be bad for tech. 

Zuckerberg said the company would ‘go to the mat’ to defeat Warren’s expected effort to break up the world’s largest social media company if she were elected president.

‘If she (Warren) gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government,’ he said, according to the leaked audio. 

Warren, who in March called for breaking up Amazon.com Inc , Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc, quickly issued a retort on Twitter.

‘What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights,’ Warren tweeted.

In a later series of tweets, Warren noted that Facebook has built more market dominance in recent years by acquiring potential competitors WhatsApp and Instagram.

‘More than 85% of all social networking traffic goes through sites owned or operated by Facebook,’ she wrote. ‘They’ve got a lot of power-and face little competition or accountability.

‘They´ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, undermined our democracy, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’

In the audio, Zuckerberg said breaking up big tech companies would make election interference ‘more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.’

Zuckerberg also drew laughter by saying Facebook’s investment on safety is bigger than Twitter’s entire revenue.