Hedge fund honcho Ken Griffin’s record-setting donation to Carnegie Mellon University for a new campus in Miami — months after being dragged by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to promote his pied-à-terre tax — is “a loss” for New York, the head of the city’s business advocacy group said Sunday.
The Citadel CEO pledged $2 billion last week to support the launch of a new 35-acre campus to turbocharge Florida’s technology industry, in addition to a $1 billion donation to the institution’s main Pittsburgh campus.
Griffin, 57, did not allocate any funds to Manhattan’s Carnegie Mellon campus, which business leaders claimed was no coincidence after the socialist mayor used the billionaire as a poster child for his “tax the rich” agenda.
“This week, we saw a huge gift to Miami from Ken Griffin of Citadel — $3 billion. When people have second headquarters and second offices, the philanthropy doesn’t double,” Steve Fulop, the President of Partnership for New York City, said on 77 WABC’s “Cats Roundtable.”
“It gets shared between different places. When Ken Griffin, who had a presence in New York City and a presence in Chicago, goes to Miami and gives that money [away], it’s a loss for us,” Fulop told host John Catsimatidis.
Fulop, a Democrat who served as Jersey City mayor for three terms before stepping aside last year, also addressed recent reporting by The Post that members of Hizzoner’s inner circle planned to use influencers to smear city business leaders.
“It sounded like a very extraordinary step in a negative way, especially when you think about the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare,” Fulop said, adding that the singling out of any executives by democratic socialist operatives tied to City Hall would be “beyond the pale.”
“We’re in an environment with a lot of mental illness. And, of course, there’s more political violence. I reached out to the Mayor, to his political director, to his [communications] director. We all connected, and they said it wasn’t true. And so, you take him at his word. [But] you stay vigilant and watchful. You’ve got to take [Mamdani] at his word because nothing has happened yet.”
In April, Mamdani filmed a social media video in front of Griffin’s 24,000-square-foot property at 220 Central Park South, saying that the billionaire’s second home — which was purchased in 2019 for $238 million — exemplified the need for a pied-à-terre tax.
The controversial tax on second-home condos and co-ops worth at least $1 million, and one- to three-family homes worth more than $5 million, was enacted this summer but hit a legal snag last week when a State Supreme Court judge ruled that New York City improperly published the names of over 900,000 residents and individuals that the tax was wrongly aimed at.
The city was ordered to restart its rollout of the pied-à-terre tax from scratch. City lawyers had already filed a notice of appeal.
Nearly 20% of state tax revenue is derived from the securities industry, which state officials estimated last year accounts for about 8% of the city’s jobs.
“Citadel, Goldman, JP Morgan, Apollo are all talking about the attractions of Texas. That’s bad for New York,” said Fulop. “We’ve got to fix that.”
Griffin’s gift was the largest ever donation to an educational institution, dwarfing former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion endowment to Johns Hopkins in 2018.