Mamdani Declared War on Wall Street — Then Met Them in Secret

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]This is a very interesting story of how bad policies pushes good people away from your city. Rob, do you have the clip of Mondani saying what he's going to be doing to Ken Griffin's house and then Ken Griffin responds back. Now, he responds back at Mondani. If the audience, if you haven't seen this, this clip is this guy says we are no longer going to let billionaires having penthouses here that they no longer live in and here's what we're going to do. We're going to tax the rich on second properties that they have and then Ken Griffin responds back in a very simple way. Hey, no problem. You think that's a lot of money for me? Watch what I'm pulling away from New York. But first, watch the socialist communist Islamist Mondani, mayor of New York City, giving his pitch on taxing the rich. Picture this. It is April 15th, 2026, tax day in America, and the brand new mayor of New York City, the biggest, most powerful city in the entire country, Zohran walks outside to a sidewalk on Central Park South. He is standing in front of a glass tower. He pulls out his phone, looks straight into the camera, and says, "When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we are taxing the rich." New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Scott Singer is the former mayor of Boca Raton, Florida, and a Republican candidate for Florida's 25th Congressional District. He joins us now. Scott, thanks so much for being with us. Um it was this ad uh by Zohran Mamdani that really ticked off what one of the biggest business leaders uh who's got a place in New York. Uh this is Mamdani talking about Ken Griffin.

[00:01:30]Listen here.

[00:01:32]I said I was going to tax the rich.

[00:01:36]Well, today we're taxing the rich. I'm thrilled to announce we secured a pied-a-terre tax.

[00:01:41]Uh all right, so this was Ken Griffin's response to that ad. Listen here.

[00:01:45]It was creepy and weird.

[00:01:48]He is not standing in front of just any building. He specifically chose this building. This tower behind him is home to a penthouse that cost $238 million.

[00:01:57]That is the most expensive home ever sold in the history of the United States, and it belongs to Ken Griffin, one of the 50 richest people on planet Earth and the founder of Citadel, one of the most powerful hedge funds in the world. The video went viral, 52 million views. People loved it. It felt real. It felt brave. It felt like a politician actually doing what he promised. But here is the part the internet did not talk about. Just a few weeks later, the same mayor in the same city walked into the headquarters of JP Morgan Chase on Park Avenue, sat across from Jamie Dimon, the most powerful banker in America, and had a quote genial conversation. Then that same evening he hosted Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon at Gracie Mansion, the official home of New York City's mayor. They talked about affordable housing. They talked about collaboration. Solomon even invited him to visit Goldman's offices. The man who filmed himself shaming a billionaire's home on social media was now privately courting the richest banker class in the country and asking them politely, "Please do not leave." So what happened?

[00:03:00]That is exactly what we are going to break down today. Let us start from the very beginning because this story only makes sense if you understand the math behind it. New York City has a budget problem, not a small one. When Mamdani took office, the city was staring down a deficit of somewhere between 10 and 12 billion dollars. That is money the city does not have. And this is the same city that needs to pay for schools, for hospitals, for subway repairs, for police, for fire departments, for everything that makes a city run.

[00:03:30]Mamdani ran for mayor with a very specific promise. He said, "I will fix this by taxing the rich." He said he would raise income taxes on anyone making over 1 million dollars a year.

[00:03:40]That is roughly 34,000 households in New York City, you know, a very small group, and it would raise about 3 billion dollars every year. He also pushed for what is called a pied-a-terre tax. That is a French term. It basically means a second home. His plan was to put an annual fee on luxury properties worth over $5 million whose owners do not actually live in the city full-time.

[00:04:00]That would bring in another $500 million per year. These are not small numbers.

[00:04:05]This is real money and for regular New Yorkers, the people who ride the subway, who need child care, who cannot afford rent, these programs sound amazing.

[00:04:15]Mondani promised free buses. He promised universal child care. He promised to make the city actually work for the people who live there every day, not just for the people who own penthouses and fly in from Miami for the weekend.

[00:04:28]So, he filmed that video and it felt like a statement. It felt like we see you, we know you are there, and you are going to pay your fair share. The problem is what happened next. The CEO of America's biggest bank, Jamie Dimon, uh we're here in Detroit where JP Morgan has invested billions of dollars. And one of the key businesses that helped revitalize this one bankrupt city was banking. And the big question tonight is what sort of relationship will big business, which is at the core of capitalism and at the core of New York City, what will they have with the new Democratic Socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani? So, I asked Jamie Dimon about his relationship with Mamdani. Here is our exclusive interview. Ken Griffin did not stay quiet. He went to the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles and one of the biggest gatherings of billionaires and CEOs in the world and he sat on a panel and he said on camera that when he first saw Mamdani's video, he could not believe what he was watching. He said he had to watch it twice to understand what he was seeing.

[00:05:25]He called it creepy. He called it weird.

[00:05:28]He called it frightening. And then he did something that changed the entire story. He said Citadel, his company, well, would double down on Miami. He said New York under Mamdani does not embrace success. And he announced that instead of expanding in New York, he would be building a much bigger office in Florida and adding far more jobs there. Now, here is where this becomes real for ordinary people. Citadel is not a small company. Over the last 5 years alone, Citadel has paid approximately $2.3 billion in city and state taxes in New York. That is not charity. That is the cost of doing business. And those taxes pay for the very programs Momadani wants to expand. But, it goes even deeper than that. When a company like Citadel grows in a city, it does not just bring its own jobs. It brings thousands of support jobs. The lawyers who handle the deals, the restaurants where the analysts eat lunch, the taxi drivers, the hotel workers, the cleaning crews, the tech contractors. A major hedge fund is not just a hedge fund. It is an ecosystem. When that ecosystem moves to Miami, the people who lose first are not the billionaires. The billionaires go wherever they want. The people who lose first are middle-class and working-class New Yorkers who depended on that economic activity.

[00:06:37]The State Department has reported and met with officials in Havana, Cuba, and warned them that they have a small window to make a deal. We spoke to Katie McFarland earlier on the show about that. Here's what she had to say about it.

[00:06:50]Marco Rubio has his parents are from Cuba. He has apparently been talking to on the sidelines and actually meeting in person at one point, but talking on the phone with the grandson of Raul Castro.

[00:07:03]They speak in Spanish and it's like two guys in Hialeah, Florida talking to each other. They get along. Raul Nieto understands that the old And then there was something else Griffin brought up that nobody really wanted to talk about.

[00:07:16]After the Luigi Manzone case, you know, where a CEO of a major health insurance company was shot and killed on the streets of Midtown Manhattan in 2024, the security concerns for top executives in New York City are not theoretical.

[00:07:28]Griffin said that video filmed outside his home, pointing his home out by name and face to tens of millions of people felt like a personal attack. He said it put him in harm's way. Business leaders in New York rallied around him. The CEO of Vornado, one of the biggest real estate companies in the city, said and I am paraphrasing here, "The video was ugly and unnecessary and personal." Now, you might agree with that, or you might think Griffin is being dramatic. That is a fair debate, but here is the part that is not up for debate. Within weeks of releasing that video, within weeks of publicly pointing at a billionaire's home and saying, "We are taxing you."

[00:08:03]Mamdani was in private meetings trying to reassure the exact same class of people that he was not their enemy. On May 18th, 2026, Mamdani walked into JP Morgan's brand new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue. He sat down with Jamie Dimon, the man who had written in his shareholder letter that no city has a divine right to success, and who had been publicly warning for months that New York's tax policies could drive business away. Their conversation, according to sources who were briefed on it, was described as constructive. The tone was friendly. JP Morgan's official spokesperson said they discussed government and business working together to keep the city competitive. That same evening, Mamdani hosted Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon at Gracie Mansion.

[00:08:45]They talked about Goldman's investments in affordable housing. They talked about small businesses. Solomon invited him to visit Goldman's offices, and that was just Monday. In recent weeks leading up to that, Mamdani had also separately met with Blackstone President Jonathan Gray.

[00:09:01]He met with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. He met with the CEO of Chobani. The New York Times described it this way, "Mamdani appeared keen to adopt a more business-friendly attitude." Let that sink in. The mayor who filmed himself outside a billionaire's home saying, "Today, we are taxing the rich." was now described in the New York Times as trying to appear more business-friendly. This is the contradiction that nobody is fully explaining to you. On one side of his mouth, Mamdani is saying, "The system is broken. The rich do not pay enough.

[00:09:30]Working people are pushed to the brink, and I am going to change that." And he is right that the system has real problems. New York's property tax system is genuinely broken in ways that benefit wealthy property owners. Griffin's $238 million penthouse, for example, is officially valued at only $9.4 million for tax purposes. A regular apartment in Queens might be taxed at a higher effective rate than a billionaire's skyscraper penthouse. That is real. That is a legitimate problem worth fixing.

[00:09:59]But on the other side, Mamdani knows and his team knows that the city's budget and specifically the programs he promised depend entirely on whether that same wealthy class stays in New York and keeps paying taxes. The math only works if they stay. If Citadel moves to Miami, if Goldman expands in Dallas, if the top earners quietly shift their primary residences to Florida or Texas, where there is no state income tax, the $3 billion a year Mamdani is counting on simply does not materialize. And Florida does not have a state income tax. Texas does not have a state income tax. These are not abstract threats. They are already happening. Companies have been leaving New York for years. Goldman Sachs already moved a major asset management division to Dallas. JP Morgan has expanded in other states. The trend is real and it predates Mamdani. What Mamdani's video did and whether intentionally or not was give that trend a face and a moment. It gave every finance executive who was already thinking about it a concrete reason to accelerate. And Mamdani's team clearly understood this because within weeks they were doing the exact opposite of what the video suggested. They were in rooms with these same people, not shaming them but listening to them, reassuring them, and yes, asking them to stay. Now, let us be fair here and talk about what the different sides of the media are telling you and what they are leaving out. If you watch left-leaning media, you mostly hear about the policy.

[00:11:22]You hear about the budget deficit. You hear about how popular the idea of taxing the rich is among New York City voters, and it genuinely is popular. The numbers show most New Yorkers support raising taxes on millionaires. You hear about how the pied-a-terre tax is a smart reasonable policy that targets people who own apartments they barely use. Left media mostly frames the private meetings as responsible governance. The mayor is just doing his job reaching out to all stakeholders.

[00:11:49]What you do not hear much about from that side, the real job losses that could follow capital flight, the security concerns that Griffin raised about the video, or the fact that the math of Mamdani's social programs only works if the people he is publicly attacking actually choose to stay. If you watch right-leaning media, you mostly hear about the creepy video, the socialist agenda, the war on success, and the word exodus. You hear about Miami and Texas and how businesses are fleeing. Fox Business ran a segment about Wall Street fleeing New York because of Mamdani's agenda. What you do not hear much about from that side, the scale of New York's budget crisis, the fact that the city's property tax system genuinely under taxes luxury properties, the fact that 34,000 millionaire households is a very small group being asked to contribute more to close a multi-billion dollar hole, or the fact that Mamdani's programs are designed to help millions of low- and middle-income people who have nowhere else to go. The truth, as it usually is, lives in both places at once. And the contradiction at the center of this story is not left or right, it is the basic tension of modern progressive politics. You need the rich to fund the programs that help the poor.

[00:12:59]You cannot have one without the other.

[00:13:01]The moment you drive the rich out and with either policy or rhetoric, the programs disappear, too. Mamdani's own press secretary put it in a statement that is almost perfectly self-contradictory.

[00:13:11]He said Mayor Mamdani wants all New Yorkers to succeed, including business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make New York City the economic engine of America. He said it includes Ken Griffin, who is a major employer in the city and a powerful figure in the economy. Then in the next sentence, he said the tax system is fundamentally broken, rewards extreme wealth, and is unsustainable and unjust.

[00:13:34]So, Ken Griffin is a valuable part of the city's economic engine. And also, the system that allowed him to build that engine is unjust and needs to be dismantled. Both of those things might be true at the same time, but you can see the problem. When you make a video standing outside that man's home using it as your prop, you are not saying I respect your contribution to our city's economy. You are saying the opposite.

[00:13:55]And then when he responds by threatening to take his company and his 2.3 billion dollars in annual tax payments to Florida, you have to run and reassure him that actually you do respect him and his money is very welcome here. That is not hypocrisy in the dishonest sense. It is the tension that every progressive politician faces in a capitalist system.

[00:14:16]You genuinely need the billionaires to pay more, and you genuinely need the billionaires to stay, and those two goals can work against each other if you are not careful about how you go after them. Here is the bottom line for you, for anyone watching this who is not a billionaire and not a hedge fund CEO, if Mamdani's tax policies work and if the rich stay, they pay more and that money funds child care and buses and housing, then ordinary New Yorkers benefit enormously. That is the best-case scenario. If the backlash accelerates capital flight, if firms move to Miami, if wealthy residents quietly become Florida residents for tax purposes, if Griffin's 6 billion dollars planned office tower at 350 Park Avenue does not get built, then the city loses jobs, loses tax revenue, and the programs Mamdani promised become harder or impossible to fund. That is the worst-case scenario. And the people who pay the price in that scenario are not Ken Griffin. He will be fine in Miami.

[00:15:10]The people who pay are the New Yorkers who depended on those jobs and those programs. That is why the private meetings matter. That is why the shift in tone matters. Not because Mamdani is corrupt or dishonest, but because governing a real city with a real budget is not the same as filming a campaign video on a sidewalk. The math is hard, the tradeoffs are real, and the rich, as it turns out, have to actually choose to stay for any of this to work. Today, we are taxing the rich is a great line for a video. Whether the rich are still in New York City in 3 years to actually be taxed, that is the real question. And the answer depends a lot less on what Mumdani says on camera and a lot more on what happens in those closed rooms at 270 Park Avenue. That is the story both sides of media are not fully telling you. If this kind of breakdown is useful to you, the kind that does not just take one side and run, subscribe and let me know in the comments. If you were the mayor of New York City, would you have made that video? Or would you have gone straight to the boardroom to secure the tax base before going after it publicly?

[00:16:11]I want to read your answers.