‘Let Them Eat Cake’: Elizabeth Warren’s Marie Antoinette Moment

Mythology surrounds Marie Antoinette, a French royal so removed from the struggles of common people that she allegedly couldn’t fathom why they were upset about not having bread.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) plays a similar role in the debate over private equity in 401(k)s — and the irony is chocolate cake rich.

Call her Sen. Antoinette. Warren tells average American workers, “Let them eat index funds,” while she herself indulges in higher-returning investments for her own retirement.

Warren is crusading against the Trump administration’s Labor Department-proposed rule, currently open for public comment, that would expand access to private-market investments in 401(k) plans.

Independent Women is submitting public comment and gathering comments from others until the June 1 deadline in support of this rule.

Warren badgered Empower Retirement, the country’s second-largest retirement services provider, for encouraging contribution plans for retirement savers in private equity and private credit. Warren called PE investments a “Wall Street time bomb,” and warned darkly that allowing working people access to such investments serves no one “other than private funds.”

The senator from Massachusetts appointed herself guardian of the little guy’s nest egg. There’s just one problem: the little guys she’s protecting can’t have what she has.

Start with Warren’s own financial disclosure. Her largest retirement asset — between $1 million and $5 million — sits in TIAA-CREF Traditional, a guaranteed-principal fund available almost exclusively to university professors and academic elites. It offers something no ordinary 401(k) holder can access: a promise that you’ll never lose your principal, a guaranteed minimum interest rate, and a lifetime income stream. Warren collected $88,423 in retirement income from it in 2024 alone. That’s not a 401(k). That’s a golden parachute stitched together by decades of Ivy League employment.

Pure hypocrisy: among Warren’s disclosed holdings is a TIAA Real Estate Account, valued between $500,000 and $1 million. A private real estate fund. An alternative investment of the very asset category she insists is too risky, too opaque, and too Wall Street for average Americans’ retirement accounts. Sen. Antoinette holds alternatives for herself while pulling up the drawbridge for everyone else.

And it doesn’t stop there. Massachusetts, her home state, has private equity throughout its public pension system. And Harvard, where she built her career, has 39% of its massive endowment parked in private equity, managed by a board stacked with executives from Blackstone, General Atlantic, and other titans of the industry she vilifies on the Senate floor.

In other words: private equity for me, not for thee.

The national picture makes this even more glaring. Roughly 89% of public pension funds across America invest in private equity. Some 34 million public sector workers — teachers, firefighters, police officers — depend on these returns to fund their retirements. When the American Investment Council studied 200 public pension funds, it found private equity delivered a median annualized return of 13.5% over 10 years, outperforming every other major asset class in those portfolios.

While government employees and academic elites enjoy these returns, private-sector workers — the people actually in 401(k) plans — are largely locked out. They’re stuck with the menu their employers offer, typically public stocks and bond funds. President Donald Trump’s executive order aims to change that, instructing federal agencies to explore letting workers access alternative assets under strict fiduciary guardrails and professional management.

Sen. Antoinette hasn’t explained why a Massachusetts schoolteacher’s pension deserves access to private equity returns that a Massachusetts private-sector worker cannot touch, nor why her own TIAA Real Estate Account is a prudent holding while a similar alternative investment in a worker’s 401(k) is a “time bomb.” She ignores the core unfairness she is defending: a multi-tiered retirement system where public employees, Ivy League academics, and the wealthy elite feast on alternative investments while everyone else is banned “for their own good.”

There is a legitimate debate to be had about fees, liquidity, and investor protections — and it’s one worth having. But that is a debate about how to extend access responsibly, not whether to extend it at all. Warren isn’t engaging in the former. She’s blocking the latter.

Warren spent her career positioning herself as the scourge of a rigged system that protects the connected at the expense of everyone else. On this issue, she is the rigged system. She benefits from guaranteed returns, private real estate funds, and PE-backed pensions that she wants to deny to the very workers she claims to champion.

It’s time to end the double standard Warren champions and expand retirement freedom and affordability for everyday Americans.

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Carrie Sheffield is director of the Center for AI and Technology at Independent Women and author of ”Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.”