There is something slightly unfair about this, in a very tiny-violin sort of way. Zuckerberg is not an evil business mastermind. He doesn’t run private prisons, his product doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, and he isn’t destroying the environment. In many ways he epitomizes the American dream: He turned a privileged upbringing into a life of super-extra-Bond-villain power and privilege by building a better, more capable version of a thing that many other people had thought of before he did. Then he bought up every competitor he could and copied the ones he couldn’t.

He played the game very well, ruthlessly and with frequent flashes of genius, and even if he failed to anticipate nearly every problem with his technology, he managed to deliver fabulous results to shareholders. Now he possesses more power to shape commerce, democracy and the human psyche than anyone ever thought possible — at least according to his sometimes hyperbolic critics in media and politics, who, let’s not forget, also have a lot to lose in his rise.

But it is Zuckerberg’s very wealth and power that is now becoming a cross to bear. Recently he has found it very hard to defend the existence of billionaires. And when critics point out his power, his instinct is to disclaim it.

This has been Facebook’s whole message recently: Look, we’re trying! We never asked to be this powerful! It just sort of happened! In speech after speech Zuckerberg now warns lawmakers that getting him to stringently police his network will only reward him with more power than he has somehow already lucked into.

For which I’ll give him points: That’s a correct position. No one can defend your wealth and power, Mark Zuckerberg, not even you.

But this is exactly why Zuckerberg makes a perfect political target for this moment. It’s why Warren set him in her sights early and fires upon him so often. As a leader of what Zuckerberg recently called a “Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society,” he possesses a new and unusual kind of leverage in the world, and none of us — not lawmakers, not the traditional media, not academics or tech companies — have figured out the best way to curb his role in society.

There’s only one thing everyone seems to agree on, Zuckerberg included: that he is the epitome of having too much. To quote Kanye West, no one man should have all that power.