Sen. Elizabeth Warren Rips Jeff Bezos For Space Trip While Stiffing IRS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) flamed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for his high-flying trip to space last week after skipping out on his taxes and letting struggling Americans pick up the tab for funding the nation.

The richest guy on Earth can launch himself into space while over half the country lives paycheck to paycheck, nearly 43 million are saddled with student debt, and child care costs force millions out of work. He can afford to pitch in so everyone else gets a chance.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 25, 2021

ProPublica reported last month that Bezos — who is worth some $205 billion — didn’t pay a penny in federal income tax in 2007, 2011 or 2018. He paid a true tax rate of less than 1% between 2014 and 2018, even though his wealth soared by $99 billion.

Now, Bezos will rake in even more dough by selling tickets off-planet via his Blue Origin space company. A public auction held for one of the other three seats on the first crewed flight of the New Sheperd rocket that carried Bezos into space last Tuesday sold for $28 million. He boasted last week that Blue Origin had already sold close to $100 million in tickets for future flights.

Bezos was recently scorched on social media for thanking Amazon workers and customers for funding his flight. That was a particular clunker given that Amazon crushed workers’ efforts earlier this year to unionize and receive better pay and benefits for their labor.

Critics were also happy to agree with Warren:

Jeff Bezos really was like "your stolen wages made this possible!"

— Wagatwe Wanjuki 🇰🇪 🇧🇸 (@wagatwe) July 20, 2021

It’s beyond ridiculous when his employees are screaming out for unfair working conditions

— ClapBackKing2018 (@BackKing2018) July 25, 2021

Important to note that Bezos’ billions only accrued due to government services - like roads, a safe way to travel, safety standards for production facilities and and safe food to eat- and employees work. Taxes should be fair.

— Patricia Nolan (@PattyNolan1) July 25, 2021

He got rich from the underpaid sweat and labor of a lot of those people

— Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) July 25, 2021

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.