Joe Rogan Says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Anti-Billionaire Rhetoric Ignores What Makes America Great

Joe Rogan took aim at the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during his Tuesday, May 19 The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, pushing back on her recent viral remarks about billionaires and how they accumulate their fortunes.

“This idea that it’s easy to become a billionaire and that these billionaires somehow or another are the problem because they’re not paying their fair share is so weird,” Rogan, 58, said on the episode. He went on to argue that the numbers tell a different story, pointing to the tax contributions of the wealthy and the jobs they create.

The podcaster also made the case that the American dream is alive and well, adding, “Yeah, they make more money than everybody else. Right? You could do that too,” he said. “This is one of the things that America is really good at — you can come from nothing and become incredibly wealthy.”

Rogan’s remarks were a direct response to recent remarks made by Ocasio-Cortez, 36, which the National Enquirer previously covered.

“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” the congresswoman said on the Thursday, May 7 episode of comedian Ilana Glazer‘s podcast, It’s Open. “You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right?”

On his podcast, Rogan accused Ocasio-Cortez of advancing a narrative rooted in Democratic socialism.

“We just assume that everybody who makes an incredible amount of money stole it. That they robbed someone,” he said, adding, “I think I literally heard AOC say this recently — that no one achieves substantial wealth without somehow or another victimizing other people.”

Ocasio-Cortez has not backed down from her position. The representative reiterated her stance in a May 7 X post, writing, “The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers.”

Her X post continued, “If a billionaire amasses their wealth by underpaying their full-time workers so severely that they must rely on food assistance and government programs to survive, then no, that wealth was not earned by one individual – it was a wealth transfer subsidized by underpaid American workers and the public who get stuck with the bill for large corporations free-riding off our systems.”