MSNBC's Anand Giridharadas previously referred to Twitter CEO Elon Musk as a 'sociopath'

"I think something we often forget as Americans is that billionaires exist as a class of people who have that much money at our collective pleasure, right? It is a policy choice to allow some people to accumulate that much money, hundreds of billions of dollars, in the case of people in the United States before everybody has the chance to live with dignity, right? Other countries make that choice very differently. We have chosen historically to heavily prioritize having billionaires over having dignity for all people. And that’s a choice, I would just start by saying that we could make differently in the future," Giridharadas said.

He added, "And so I wrote the piece to try to remind people of that choice we have. And last week was remarkable. I mean, I’ve written about billionaires for years and talked about these issues on this show. But it was hard to imagine a week when there was so many spectacular reminders of the way in which this kind of billionaire classes is inconsistent with democracy as we live it."

He reiterated, "Their existence as billionaires is sort of antithetical to our flourishing as a democracy."

His New York Times piece more specifically called for policies that could tax or limit billionaires from existing in the first place.

"One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class," he wrote about Musk, Trump, Jeff Bezos and Sam Bankman-Fried.

"It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few," he wrote.