United Airlines CEO, Scott Kirby, earned $32.3 million in 2025, about 334 times what the $96,670 the airline's median employee made. On Sunday, in an interview with The New York Times, he was asked about the public's declining trust in CEOs, and his answer went somewhere most CEOs don't go: "Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that. 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 percent at some level. I would pay them."

The political reaction came hard and fast.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry posted that if Kirby feels that strongly "he could simply cut a check," and suggested he distribute his salary to the employees at the bottom of the ladder. Glenn Beck declared he'd never fly United again, and the boycott calls followed on X. Fox Business asked United how Kirby justifies his pay and whether he'd cut it to share with employees. United didn't respond, and I think that was right. There's no answer to "will the CEO take a pay cut" that doesn't make the pay the story.

That's the part the media covered. But I wanted to know what United's customers were saying, so I spent some time in r/unitedairlines and the frequent-flyer forums. It’s not a perfect analysis but it’s the closest thing to a customer read we have three days in, and it doesn't look like the headlines.

Someone posted the tax quotes under the title "Says the same guy that said that we should pay more to avoid the middle seat." It drew 945 upvotes and more than 500 comments, so yes, customers made the comparison. Then they mostly rejected it. The top reply: "I don't see anything contradictory between the two statements?" Next, "if anything, this post is praise." Then, "Businesses exist to make money, not redistribute it. Government does the latter."

A separate post calling the interview "awful takes" got voted down to zero and the author deleted it. The support wasn't only from people who agree with him on tax. "If the alternative is a CEO who never says anything I will take Scott Kirby," wrote one. A self-described twelve-time 1K and shareholder called him the best CEO United has had in a long time. The people threatening to leave in those threads were leaving over status devaluation and service, not over his politics, and a self-described three-million-miler who hated the tax idea told him to get better food on the planes, not goodbye. One flyer put the whole boycott question away in a sentence saying, "There's no way in hell that 50% of his customers know who Scott Kirby is."

So the political controversy and the customer conversation are two different things here, and a comms team that treated Beck's post as a customer crisis would be solving a problem it doesn't have.

What the customers were doing instead was taking apart another answer from the same interview.

The reporter, Jordyn Holman, asked Kirby, "If you're not a frequent flier with United, you have to pay $70 to not be in a middle seat. How do customers without frequent-flier status fit into your strategy?" Kirby talked about Starlink and seat-back screens for everyone, not just the ones with status, then said, "Some people just want to get from A to B at the cheapest price possible. There are some customers who want to sit in a window seat or a better seat, and that costs money to deliver. The way to give everyone what they want is to charge for the services and products that those customers want." Asked whether frequent fliers had become the haves and everyone else the have-nots, he said, "I would never describe it that way. There are customers that pay more that get more."

The Times headline was "United's C.E.O. Says It Should Cost More Not to Sit in the Middle Seat." A 699-upvote thread under that headline is mostly people asking whether it doesn't already, because it does, along with a lot of generic anger about fees. Several commenters said the Times did him dirty but many readers skipped the headline and went for the sentence underneath it. "How does a window seat cost more to deliver?" one asked. Another, "He said window seats cost more to operate. Which is an absurd made up lie." The frequent-flyer bloggers who defended him made the same correction more politely: airlines price on what people will pay, not what a seat costs to provide, and that's fine, so say that.

And unfortunately for anyone prepping Kirby for this interview, United’s customers wrote the better answer for him. "He should have said the inverse," one commenter offered, "we understand that middle seats are less preferable and there's lower demand for them, so we're making middle seats cheaper." Another, "His PR dept needs to reword this to 'we should charge less for a middle seat.'" Same policy but different language.

I don't personally think Kirby's two positions conflict (although I don’t understand the business objective behind raising the wealth tax point in this particular interview). Running a profitable airline and wanting a more progressive tax code are very different topics, and his customers said so faster than most pundits did. A couple of them even built the bridge he didn't: an airline's whole business depends on ordinary people having disposable income, so an airline CEO worrying about wealth concentration is talking his own book. That argument was available to him and he didn't make it.

So the problem isn’t the big picture. It’s two specific things:

1. The first is window seats "costs more money to deliver," which fails the test every traveler can run by just using their eyeballs to look at the seat next to them.

2. The second is "close to 100 percent at some level," which became "100 percent inheritance tax" within a single news cycle. The inheritance tax, not the wealth tax, is what drew the real anger in the threads, and a lot of the fight in the comments was over the qualifier, "you left out the key line 'at some level,'" one defender wrote, correctly, to no effect. A number moves fast and far and the qualifiers don’t. That's worth saying out loud in prep, because executives tend to believe the hedge protects them. It might protect you in the transcript but not in the headline.

All of this landed on a hard week for the affordability argument. Fares are up, United says fuel is the reason, and on Wednesday Kirby told investors fuel will stay elevated through all of 2027 and that double-digit margins next year probably require airlines to keep prioritizing higher fares over fuller planes. The night before, the company guided fourth-quarter profit well below what Wall Street expected. Kirby has a decent affordability line, that fares are still below 2019 in real terms, but as far as I can tell from the coverage he didn't use it in the Times interview. It's exactly the kind of sentence that belongs next to a wealth-tax opinion, and it wasn't there.

The counsel

First, before the CEO says in an interview who should have more money and who should have less, somebody has to have the courage to ask what United gets out of it. He’s entitled to the view but the question is what business objective it serves, said by the CEO of an airline. There was possibly a real answer available, that an airline sells to the mass market and the mass market needs disposable income, but he didn’t make that point so the comment reads as a personal position.

Second, when the CEO rejects a reporter's frame, he has to replace it. "I would never describe it that way" is a rejection with nothing after it, and nothing after it means the reporter's version becomes the headline, which is what happened.

Third, never defend a price with a cost that isn't real. Willingness to pay is a perfectly defensible reason to charge $70 for a window. A fictional cost is a gift to every critic with a seat map and eyeballs.

What’s interesting is that the seat answer was already on the record when he got to inequality. So his tax comment just went and found it an audience. If there’s one question I’d ask in the United prep debrief, it’s who decided the wealth-tax opinion was worth that, and what they thought it was buying.