On August 21, in Valence, Manon Aubry takes the stage at the Amfis of La France insoumise. The theme already hits hard: should billionaires be banned? The MEP, a former Oxfam staffer, does not mince words. Taxing the rich is no longer enough. They must be banned. Without them, no one left to own the media or wreck the planet. And from a purely economic standpoint, she insists, they are forms of pests. I stand by it. The clip goes out, the party shares it, the networks catch fire. A few days later, on Instagram, she doubles down. She lists French fortune families. While millions work to make a living, a few inherit billions and play Monopoly with our lives. Foxes are not the pests, the concentration of billions is. A pointed reference to the government list of species classified as pests and huntable. Subtle. On Wednesday, August 26, Gérald Darmanin pulls out all the stops on X. Everyone should be deeply scandalized by your message, madam. The French families, patriotic and courageous, who invest and create hundreds of thousands of jobs are an asset for our country. Insulting them, putting a target on their backs, undermines the cause you claim to defend. The Keeper of the Seals dons the costume of defender of French entrepreneurship. Touching, almost. On Thursday, at the Medef debate, Gabriel Attal drives the point home. He demands an apology from Jean-Luc Mélenchon for Manon Aubry’s remarks that allegedly called French entrepreneurs pests and parasites. Hearty applause from the employers’ side. Aubry replies: Attal pretends to hear entrepreneurs when she says billionaires. The problem is the rentiers. And she in turn demands an apology for the truncation. The facts on the remarks? Established. Video, LFI clip, Instagram and X posts, cross-reactions. No doubt about what was said. Manon Aubry stands by it. Darmanin and Attal react. Mathilde Panot and other Insoumis pile on: the rich are seceding, many are heirs, wealth sharing is necessary. Jean-Michel Aphatie sees in it the words of totalitarianism. Aubry denounces an antisemitic amalgamation. Heated exchange, classic. On the numbers side, France has around fifty billionaires according to recent rankings. A large share of heirs, often cited around 80% by some analyses. Their companies weigh heavily in jobs and exports, luxury leading the way. LVMH, Hermès and the like employ tens of thousands of people in France. But dividends and share buybacks reach record highs while net job creation remains more modest. Analyses diverge depending on the camps: wealth creators on one side, accumulators on the other. French GDP would not collapse without them. It would rest on many other pillars. Conversely, making them disappear with a stroke of the law is more slogan than flight plan. Ban billionaires? How? A wealth ceiling? Confiscation beyond one billion? A strengthened exit tax? Past ISF experiences showed the outflows. Millionaires are already leaving the country. A Zucman-style tax was debated and rejected. The 13,000 well-off households that would not pay income tax return to the debate, but it is often about optimization or special cases, not an army of billionaires on the run. Official sources and Bercy notes cross paths without always perfectly overlapping. The blind spots are numerous. Aubry talks about economic and ecological impact without laying out the detailed how-to that day. Darmanin celebrates job-creating families without dwelling on media concentration or the tax havens of certain yachts. Attal blithely confuses billionaires and entrepreneurs for the Medef stage. Everyone pulls the blanket to themselves. The reader, for their part, is left with a simple question: denouncing the extreme concentration of wealth is a legitimate debate. Calling human beings pests and wanting to ban them turns the debate into provocation. And provocation, in politics, always sells papers and likes. Provisional conclusion: Manon Aubry’s remarks are accurate in their wording and assumed. The controversy is real, so are the reactions. On the economic substance, the evidence of pure pestilence remains argued opinions, not certainties measurable to the nearest euro. Simply banning them still amounts to incantation. The buzz has done its job. The truth, for its part, still awaits a somewhat more precise tally than the snappy formulas. Pending 2027, the billionaires are probably sleeping soundly. The foxes, a little less so.