Pity the Billionaire

Steve Roth compared “tax the rich” to a racial slur. On a quarterly earnings call. To his investors. He wasn’t embarrassed. He was making a business case.

May 14, 2026

DULY CONSIDER · POLITICS · SCIENCE · TECH · PHILOSOPHY

CLASS · POWER · THE PYRAMID · MAY 2026

On May 5, 2026, Steven Roth, chairman and CEO of Vornado Realty Trust — one of New York City’s largest landlords, net worth north of $1.1 billion, longtime business partner of Donald Trump — used his company’s first-quarter earnings call to deliver a six-minute rant.¹ He was not asked about this. He volunteered it. He compared the phrase “tax the rich” to a racial slur. Then he said the ultra-rich should be “praised and thanked.”

This is that piece.

PART ONE

The Forum

The forum matters more than the quote. A quarterly earnings call is the most formal, most documented, most consequential public communication a public company CEO makes. It is legally significant. It is recorded and transcribed. It is the context in which the fiduciaries of a company speak to the people whose money they steward, on the record, under scrutiny.

Roth chose this forum — not a dinner party, not a private conversation, not a hot microphone — to compare a tax policy slogan to the language of racial terror. Which means one of two things: either he is so insulated from consequence that he genuinely did not register the comparison as extraordinary, or he did register it and said it anyway because he believed his audience would nod along.

Neither interpretation is flattering. Both are instructive.

Verbatim Vornado Q1 Earnings Call May 5 2026: I consider the phrase tax the rich when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase from the river to the sea. — Steven Roth, Vornado CEO, net worth $1.1B+

VERBATIM · VORNADO Q1 2026 EARNINGS CALL · MAY 5, 2026 · UNPROMPTED

The full quote, unreduced: Roth compared “tax the rich” not only to racial slurs but also to “from the river to the sea” — the pro-Palestinian protest slogan.² He bundled taxation, anti-genocide advocacy, and the language of racial terror into a single category of offense. The category, apparently, is: things said about powerful people that make them uncomfortable.

PART TWO

The Words He Reached For

Roth did not specify which slurs. He didn’t need to. His audience knew. The words he was reaching for — the ones that carry sufficient weight to make “tax the rich” feel equivalent — have one thing in common: they were coined by people who owned other people, wielded by people who lynched them, and deployed for centuries to keep an entire population in economic subjugation.

He borrowed that history. He took the moral weight of terror — of whips and ropes and the specific vocabulary of dehumanization — and used it as a shield for a tax on second homes worth over five million dollars.²

He drew the line from plantation to penthouse himself. This piece just follows it.

The pied-à-terre tax that triggered Roth’s rant is modest in its ambitions: an annual surcharge on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners don’t live in the city full time.² It would raise an estimated $500 million annually.³ It is supported by 93% of New Yorkers.⁴ The target is not residents. The target is wealth storage — the use of Manhattan real estate as an investment vehicle by people who do not live there, do not contribute to the city’s daily life, and do not, until this proposal, pay meaningfully for the privilege.

This is what Roth compared to a lynching slur. A tax on empty penthouses.

PART THREE

The Pyramid Speaks

The Pyramid: Top 1% pays 50% of NYC income taxes. True. Top 1% holds $8.5 trillion in untaxed unrealized gains. Also true. The pied-a-terre tax: luxury second homes over $5M. Supported by 93% of New Yorkers.

THE NUMBERS ROTH CITED ALONGSIDE THE NUMBERS HE DIDN’T

Roth’s defense of his class is worth quoting in full, because it reveals the theology underneath the outrage. “The rich whom the politicians are targeting started with nothing, are the epitome of the American dream,” he said.¹ “They are our largest employers and largest philanthropists, and it is the 1% that pay 50% of New York’s income taxes. They are at the top of the great American economic pyramid for a reason. They should be praised and thanked.”

The 50% figure is accurate.⁵ What Roth omitted: America’s ultra-wealthy have accumulated $8.5 trillion in unrealized capital gains — wealth that has never been taxed and, under current law, may never be.⁶ The pyramid Roth invokes is not a meritocratic structure. It is a structure in which the people at the top accumulate untaxed wealth at a rate that outpaces everything below, while the same political class cutting their taxes cuts food benefits for the people at the base.⁶

The base carries the load. The top contributes nothing but more weight. Roth called this a reason for gratitude.

PART FOUR

His Partner in the Building

Ken Griffin CNBC Milken Conference May 6 2026: He put me in harm's way. He seems to have forgotten that the CEO of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York.

Hours after Roth’s earnings call, Ken Griffin — net worth $48 billion, Roth’s partner on a planned $6 billion office tower at 350 Park Avenue — appeared at the Milken Global Conference and invoked the 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.⁷ Mayor Mamdani’s video, filmed on a public sidewalk outside Griffin’s $238 million penthouse, had put him “in harm’s way,” Griffin said.

A politician standing on a public sidewalk, promoting a tax policy supported by 93% of his constituents, is now violence against the ultra-rich.⁷ Griffin filed permits to expand Citadel’s Miami headquarters in direct retaliation.⁷ The message was clear: tax us and we leave. The implicit threat underneath it: and take the jobs with us.

Detroit, Griffin warned, was once the wealthiest city in America per capita. The implication hung in the room at Milken.

Detroit didn’t fail because it taxed the rich. Detroit failed because the rich left anyway, took the factories with them, and blamed the unions on the way out.

PART FIVE

Poor Steve

Mr. T sits in the audience at the Vornado Earnings Call as Steve Roth screams that Tax the Rich is the worst racial slur. Mr. T's speech bubble: I Pity the Billionaire.

ILLUSTRATION: DULY CONSIDER

Mr. T built his entire public identity on working-class toughness — the aesthetic and attitude of a man who came from nothing and made something through sheer force of will. The gold chains were not inherited. The persona was not given. He is, in Roth’s own framing, the epitome of the American dream. And he is sitting in that earnings call looking up at a billionaire having a meltdown about a tax on his second home, delivering the only verdict that fits.

Roth’s own words are the indictment. He called Mamdani’s video “irresponsible and dangerous.”¹ A politician on a sidewalk. Irresponsible and dangerous. He called for the mayor to fix the city’s budget deficit “by managing rather than by taxing.”⁸ He offered — in what he apparently intended as generosity — that Mamdani is “young, smart and energetic” and that “with a little tweak here and a little tweak there, his leadership could make this great city even greater.”⁸

A billionaire instructing the elected mayor of New York City to tweak his policies, from a quarterly earnings call, because the mayor stood on a public sidewalk and named him adjacent to a tax on empty penthouses.

The man at the top of the pyramid, looking down, finding the view insufficient. Reaching for the most loaded language in American history to describe his discomfort. Asking to be thanked for it.

Pity the billionaire. He’s had a very hard quarter.