Jun 3, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders says “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary is “completely separated from the reality that ordinary Americans are experiencing” during the debut episode of the new MeidasTouch program, ”On Sunday with Jack Cocchiarella”.
The 84-year-old independent senator from Vermont was shown a clip from O’Leary’s appearance on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast with Steven Bartlett, in which the Canadian-American businessman scolded younger workers for buying lunch.
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“I can’t stand it when I see kids that are making 70 grand a year spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that’s just stupid,” O’Leary said. “Think about that in the context of that being put into an index and making 8 to 10% a year for the next 50 years.”
Sanders, who has spent much of the past year on a nationwide ”Fighting Oligarchy” tour alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, used the clip as a jumping-off point for his broader argument about the political power of the ultra-wealthy.
“They have no clue. They live in their own world,” Sanders said, referring to hyper-rich figures like O’Leary, whose net worth is reportedly in the ballpark of $150 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. “Because many of them are smart and they work hard and they’ve made a lot of money, you know what they think? They think they have the divine right to rule.”
Back of the napkin
O’Leary isn’t necessarily wrong. Instead of spending $28 on a single lunch, that same money invested in an S&P 500 index fund, assuming an annual return of 8%, would grow to roughly $800,000 over 50 years.
The problem is the salary in O’Leary’s example. The median household income for Americans ages 15 to 24 is below $50,000 in more than half of US cities, according to a SmartAsset analysis of 2024 Census data.
The Federal Reserve’s most recent Distributional Financial Accounts show the top 1% of U.S. households controlled 31.7% of national wealth in the third quarter of 2025 — the highest share since the Fed began tracking the data in 1989, as CBS News reported earlier this year. By contrast, the bottom 50% holds roughly 2.5%.
“Many of these guys do not believe in democracy,” Sanders told Cocchiarella, admitting he’s unsure if O’Leary feels this way specifically. “Their attitude is, ‘Hey, I am worth a couple of hundred billion dollars. I have enormous power. I’m determining the future of the world. You think that I’m gonna submit to some vote that you cast? It ain’t gonna happen that way. I run the world, kid, and you better understand that.’”
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Pushing back on America’s oligarchs
Sanders has been fighting economic inequality for decades, but he has focused particularly on America’s wealthiest business leaders since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, when Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg were seated prominently at the ceremony.
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Sanders, along with Rep. Ro Khanna, has introduced legislation that would impose a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires. The proposal would reportedly raise about $4.4 trillion over a decade. Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Ocasio-Cortez also drew more than 261,000 attendees across roughly 40 stops through the end of last year.
“Don’t even use the word ‘businesspeople,’” Sanders said when Cocchiarella referred to figures like O’Leary that way. “The guy down the shop who owns a mom and pop is a business guy. Somebody who owns a company with 30 people is a businessperson. These people are not businesspeople. They are oligarchs.”
Sanders says the wealth gap has warped the political process beyond what most voters recognize.
“What you have right now is these guys not only control the economy, not only control increasingly the media to shape what the discussion will be,” Sanders said. “The points you’re making are on the minds of tens of millions of Americans. They ain’t being discussed on CBS or NBC a whole lot. And not going to be discussed in Musk’s world as well. So we have got to force discussion on these issues.”
Sanders closed with a simple question: “It’s our world, not Mr. Musk’s and not Mr. Bezos’. What kind of world do we want?”
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
