“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary torched Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for killing “jobs by the thousands” in New York.
The reality television mogul said that New York was “uninvestable,” when he appeared on Friday’s episode of “CNN This Morning.”
“If it’s so “uninvestable,” then why is NYC home to some of the most billionaires in the world?” AOC tweeted in response.
“This is what billionaires do,” she wrote on Friday.
“They leverage their power to gain platforms and spread unsubstantiated claims to push policies that are even more favorable to them than they already are.”
The former Boston based Shark explained that blue states are driving business ventures to set up operations elsewhere.
“I don’t put companies here in New York anymore or in Massachusetts or New Jersey or California. Those states are uninvestable,” O’Leary told the show’s hosts.
“The policy here is insane. The taxes are too high,” he detailed. “We put them in Fargo, North Dakota, because 40% of the people work elsewhere, including Boston.”
He said that he had a debate with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren about relocating companies out of Massachusetts, because of the state’s policies.
“I say, ‘Look, Senator, we’ve got to move the companies out of your state because you are not investable anymore,” O’Leary recalled.
“You are punishing people if they are successful, you overtax them, you hit them with a super tax.’ New Jersey, what a mess! New York, uninvestable.”
The show’s hosts, Poppy Harlow and Don Lemon, questioned if New York’s unattractiveness for corporations went beyond taxes.
“Oh, the regulatory environment is punitive,” remarked O’Leary, who ran to be the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2017.
“I had a project in upstate New York behind the grid in Niagara Falls for electricity… A global data center we were building.”
“Eventually it got so bad with the politicians in the local region and the state policy, we moved it to Norway and all the jobs,” he said.
He insisted that the thousands of jobs that would have gone to Americans now belong to Norwegians.
“That’s New York. Uninvestable,” he summed up. “Sorry, don’t shoot the messenger. Just telling you the way it is.”
Kaitlan Collins said that New York politicians, like Governor Kathy Hochul would have “some pushback” about the statement.
“I’ll debate them anytime of the day you want,” O’Leary shot back. “Particularly AOC.”
“She’s great at killing jobs. She kills jobs by the thousands.”
He reminded the show’s anchors of AOC’s successful crusade to block Amazon from setting up a second headquarters in Queens.
“Where did Amazon take their jobs? They took them away from her. She threatened to sue them if they created jobs. I mean, this is a reality.”
Harlow chimed in that “there’s a little more to it,” but Lemon noted that O’Leary was “saying what a lot of people were saying” about the loss of Amazon in New York.
AOC defended her efforts to kill the Amazon deal in response to a Bloomberg article, that announced the company’s decision to pause construction on their second headquarters in Washington, amid job cuts.
“When I opposed this Amazon project coming to New York bc it was a scam of public funds, the whole power establishment came after us,” she began in a Twitter tirade.
“Billboards went up in Times [Square] denouncing me. Powerful pols promised revenge. Op-Eds & CEOs insulted my intelligence. In the end, we were right.”
In a follow-up post, she tweeted, “I know I’ll never get an apology for that time, but it was worth it.”
“We protected NYers from a scam deal to drain public dollars from schools & infrastructure in exchange for empty promises of “Amazon jobs” w/ 0 guarantees or guardrails. Sadly, cities who took it are suffering.”