$32 million CEO lectures America on income inequality

Published October 19, 2026 12:13pm EDT

Scott Kirby also defended charging passengers more for certain seating options

 

By Bradford Betz FOXBusiness

United Airlines CEO wealth tax proposal blasted as double taxation

Dagen McDowell slams United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby over his proposal for a national wealth tax and a near-100% inheritance tax. She calls out the double taxation and points to the hypocrisy of the airline's own elite status pricing.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes approaching 100% for certain estates, arguing that growing wealth inequality poses a threat to American society.

Kirby, who took home about $32.3 million in total compensation in fiscal year 2025, made the remarks when asked about declining public trust in corporate executives during an interview with The New York Times.

"Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that," Kirby told the outlet in an interview published Sunday.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes approaching 100% for certain estates. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The airline executive argued that a wealth tax would need to be implemented nationwide rather than at the state level to prevent wealthy Americans from relocating to avoid paying it.

From stocks to airplanes to newspapers, it's just been a bad day for tech

Outages on Wall Street, in the airline industry and at a top newspaper on Wednesday show just how precarious our digitally organized lives are.

by Laura Hautala @lhautala
July 8, 2015 1:59 PM PDT

United Airlines flights were temporarily grounded on Wednesday, but are now back in the air.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images




They say everything happens in threes. Wednesday proved that adage as the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and The Wall Street Journal all suffering outages of crucial online systems.

The strange coincidence of episodes, two of which have been publicly attributed to internal errors and not hacking attacks, shows the extent to which we live at the mercy of online systems.

Trading on the stock exchange was suspended from about 11:30 a.m. to 3:10 p.m. in New York due to a computer glitch. United Airlines flights across the US were temporarily grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration Wednesday morning because of a problem in the airline's computer network caused by a faulty router. And in the midst of it, the Journal's online homepage crashed and stayed out of commission for just under an hour for reasons the company has not yet determined.


If you were a banker trying to catch a United flight and get updates on the New York Stock Exchange from the Journal this morning, your best bet was probably to head to the nearest airport bar.


Jeff Williams, a software security specialist and the chief technology officer at Contrast Security, said although two of the companies say they weren't hacked, it's actually not that easy to make that call right away. "Could an attacker have found a vulnerability (or multiple vulnerabilities) that would allow them to take down three major firms?" he wrote in an email. "Absolutely."


Trading did continue on the NYSE's competitor exchanges, and it's not the first time a stock market has suffered from technical problems. However, it was the first time in ten years that the NYSE shut down completely during what would otherwise be normal operating hours. The last time something like this happened was in 2005, when a communication system glitch shut it down four minutes before the closing bell.


The grounding of United flights is expected to cause delays going forward, and the company has put a note on its website offering waivers for missed flights.

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