FAIRFAX, Virginia — Andrew Yang took aim at tech giant chiefs Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg for living a lavish lifestyle and inadequate fact-checking.
“I’m going to riff just a little bit. I have some insight,” Yang told a crowd of nearly 2,000 during a rally at George Mason University on Friday. “Jeff Bezos believes there is one threat to Amazon and that threat is the U.S. government. Not coincidentally, HQ2 here in the D.C. metro area — he just glued a couple penthouses together and said, ‘One was not enough. I need two, glue them together.’ Bought the Washington Post with the pocket change in his sofa, unfortunately.”
Bezos is renovating a mansion property in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood that has two adjacent structures, one for entertaining and one for living quarters, at a cost of $23 million. He bought the Washington Post in 2013, and Amazon earlier this year selected Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, as the site of its second headquarters.
The tech entrepreneur and Democratic presidential hopeful, 44, criticized the U.S. tax system for allowing Amazon to evade taxes.
“When the accountants come in at the end of the year and say, ‘Hey, Jeff, great news. Zero taxes again,'” Yang said. “And then what does Jeff do? Jeff goes into his vault, takes out bags of gold coins, gives them to each accountant, and then they go home and take a little Scrooge McDuck gold coin bath. It’s like their annual ritual.”
Later in the speech, Yang turned his scrutiny to Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg.
“I have to say it’s embarrassing that Mark Zuckerberg is clinging to the, like, ‘Oh, we can’t decide what’s true, what’s not true, too hard,'” Yang said. “I have a feeling if Facebook was making money on it, they would figure it out.”
Several Democratic presidential candidates have criticized Facebook for allowing ads from President Trump’s campaign and allies that news networks refused to run, citing inaccuracies. Facebook maintains a policy to not fact-check ads from politicians.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week said that his platform will ban all political advertisements, a move that Yang praised in a tweet.
Yang segued into his signature “freedom dividend” proposal, a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American adult, as a part of a solution to problems posed by tech companies.
“This is the trickle-up economy, Virginia. From you all, your people, your families, and your communities up. This is the opposite of the trickle-down garbage that’s been weakening us for years,” Yang said.
The broadsides against the high-profile tech executives come as Yang shows some momentum in his bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination. He’s secured a spot on the Nov. 20 Democratic debate stage. The RealClearPolitics polling average has the first time candidate at 2.8% in the polls nationally — far behind top-tier White House hopefuls such as Joe Biden, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but ahead of New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, among others.
