U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) spoke with Institute of Politics (IOP) Founding Director David Axelrod about wealth inequality and her political future on Friday at Rockefeller Chapel.

Axelrod asked Ocasio-Cortez about her recent claim that “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” which drew criticism from the Washington Post’s Editorial Board.

Ocasio-Cortez said Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, used the publication as a “mouthpiece to take aim at politicians that want to question the deeply unequal and unjust distribution of power in America.” According to Forbes, Bezos’s net worth is nearly $276 billion.

Last year, Washington Post Opinions Editor David Shipley resigned following Bezos’s announcement of a new plan to revamp the paper’s editorial section to focus on promoting “personal liberties and free markets.” Several months earlier, in October 2024, Bezos cancelled the Washington Post’s tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, killing a draft editorial in support of then Vice President Kamala Harris.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to allege that the Washington Post’s criticism was a “veiled threat” to dissuade her from running for the presidency in the future, but that she was not discouraged. “They assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “Presidents come and go,” she added, “but a living wage is forever.”

In April, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers introduced the Living Wage for All Act, which aims to slowly raise the federal minimum wage to $25 by 2031 for businesses with more than 500 employees, and by 2038 for small businesses.

Axelrod pressed her on whether billionaire entertainers like Michael Jordan, Taylor Swift or Beyoncé also “broke the rules” when it came to their wealth, a major criticism in the Washington Post editorial. He pointed out that several billionaires, including Democratic donor Alex Soros, have supported Ocasio-Cortez politically in the past, another point of contention from the editorial.

“I think this is the red herring,” Ocasio-Cortez responded. “They want us to get into this quibbling of the morality of any individual person instead of the immorality of the fact that there [is] virtually no place in America where you can afford an apartment on a full-time job on minimum wage,” she said. “In the last five years, billionaire wealth has doubled. Ask yourself if the quality of your life has doubled in the last five years.” According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth has increased by 81 percent since 2020.

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Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon

Ocasio-Cortez smiles while telling a story in response to a question from Axelrod.

Ocasio-Cortez cited judicial reform as key to addressing inequality and condemned recent court rulings on redistricting, which she said were motivated by “radical, conservative judicial activists.”

Earlier on Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a Congressional district map approved by voters, which could have netted the Democrats four additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. When asked about the ruling, Ocasio-Cortez said, “We are in an era of a very real constitutional crisis about the limits of power.”

Ocasio-Cortez also spoke about the threat of social media in politics and daily life, encouraging attendees to spend less time on social media. “We [have] got to get offline, and we need to be looking people in the eyes,” she said. “This level of conflict and polarization [we see on social media] is only possible in physical isolation and separateness.”

“A lot of these technologies and algorithms are being designed out of sync with human nature and human cognition,” she said. “They are trying to fight nature and you being in community is nature.”

Ocasio-Cortez also recounted her path to Congress, describing her defeat of 10-term incumbent Joseph Crowley in a Democratic primary election, which was seen as one of the largest upsets in the 2018 midterms.

From 2017 until Ocasio-Cortez took office in January 2019, Crowley served as the Chair of the House Democratic Caucus, running caucus meetings that Ocasio-Cortez had to attend as a representative-elect.

“I don’t know anything that’s going on. All these people know each other. Back slaps and all this stuff. [Crowley is] up there, speaking, and everybody likes him and a congressman, one of the Democrats, he leans over to me and he goes, ‘Man, it’s such a shame that girl beat him.’” After Ocasio-Cortez introduced herself to the representative, she said, “the blood drain[ed] from his face.”

“It wasn’t just that I [defeated] his friend. It’s that I did so on the basis of challenging the power structure that exists,” she said.

“I don’t want to make decisions from a place of ‘What’s in it for me?’ I want to make decisions from a place of ‘How are we going to change the country?’” she continued. “I count votes. I build caucuses. I help elect responsible and principled people, and I try to decouple our political system from money and politics.”

“No billionaire can stop that,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “No concentrated level of power, no elite, no gatekeeper can prevent me from doing everything I can, waking up every day in service of the working class.”