United Airlines CEO: 'We should have a national wealth tax'

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby gave a wide-ranging, often provocative interview to the New York Times, defending fees for aisle and window seats and countering the rise in airfares by asserting "it's expensive to fly airplanes."

"There are customers that pay more that get more," Kirby, 59, said in the interview that ran Oct. 18 .

But he struck a decidedly more populist note on the topic of wealth inequality — which he brought up when the Times asked him about waning trust in CEOs and his responsibility in dispelling it. Here's his full answer:

"Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that," he said. "We should have a national wealth tax — it won't work by state because people will just move. And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100% at some level. I would pay them."

United Airlines stock rose 0.3% before the bell on Tuesday.

Kirby is not the first or only business titan to call for bigger taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Luminaries like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and George Soros have long advocated for increasing the tax burden at their rarefied wealth levels.

"We've updated our tax system before to keep up with changing times, and we need to do it again, starting with raising taxes on people like me," Gates wrote on his blog in 2020.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce ( CRM ), wrote in 2019 that "increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and healthcare and fight climate change."

Joe Biden was president, and Democrats in Congress were gearing up to pass legislation to tax unrealized gains on individuals with a net worth of at least $1 billion or annual income of $100 million for three consecutive years. Of course, that never happened, and after President Trump was reelected, Republicans in Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included provisions that made lower marginal tax rates for high incomes permanent, along with other provisions benefiting wealthy Americans.

As for the inheritance taxes Kirby said he favors, there is no federal tax on individual beneficiaries of inherited assets. A few states impose a state inheritance tax.

There is a federal estate tax, but the exemption is so large — $15 million per person — that few people ever pay it. Only 0.2% of estates are large enough to be subject to the tax, and even then the tax applies only to the amount that exceeds the exemption threshold.

Molly Moorhead is economics editor for Yahoo Finance.