Billionaire has announced he is uncomfortable with Pope Francis recent comments on wealth.

Langone, along with some other Wall Street Republicans, is a major backer of the American Action Network, which formed just two weeks after the Citizens United decision. The so-called “think-and-do tank” takes advantage of unlimited contributions from corporations to “create, encourage and promote center-right policies

Langone is also linked to the Florida election controversy in 2000. He was a director of Database Technologies, which was bought out in 2000 by ChoicePoint Inc., a company he co-founded, when it won a $4 million contract to provide a list of people ineligible to vote. According to a Salon.com investigation, thousands of people – largely minorities listed as Democrats – were wrongfully named on the list as felons and yet never got a chance to appeal. Considering the official margin of victory in Florida was just 537 votes, ChoicePoint may have singlehandedly cost Gore the entire election. Several years later, ChoicePoint gained notoriety again for its lucrative contracts in selling personal data to the government.

He is such a vocal supporter of huge executive pay packages (several of which he has authorized himself) that his critics regard him as “a living symbol of the excesses of runaway executive compensation.” He is chummy with his chief executives and is extremely well-connected with the highest echelons of Wall Street.

When he was director of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which used to be an non-governmental organization (NGO), Langone authorized an incredible $190 million pay package for Richard Grasso, then NYSE chairman and another NYU trustee. That attracted a lawsuit from Attorney General Spitzer in 2004, who claimed that Langone and Grasso not only violated rules limiting NGO executive salaries (i.e. you couldn’t get the tax breaks that NGOs get and still get paid hundreds of millions of dollars), but also misled other board members about the actual size of the pay package. It was a very murky situation – Langone and Grasso denied excess and insisted that everybody signed off on it, while board members say they were kept in the dark about actual figures.

What’s more, a human resources executive said her boss made her hide Excel columns that listed Grasso’s total compensation before forwarding the spreadsheet to the board. Instead of backing down, Langone continued to aggressively defend Grasso’s pay for years, until an appeals court finally dropped the case. He even told Forbes in October 2004, “They got the wrong ? guy. I’m nuts, I’m rich, and boy, do I love a fight. I’m going to make them ? in their pants. When I get through with these ? captains of industry, they’re going to wish they were in a Cuisinart — at high speed. If Grasso gives back a ? nickel, I’ll never talk to him again.”