Mayor Mamdani to the business community: “Drop Dead.”
And the business community is falling to the floor and rolling over.
In his latest absurd and counterproductive attack against the city business community, Mamdani has banished executives from a fund-raising advisory board to finance various charities.
Yep, that’s as dumb as it sounds. These people had good ties to the business community, and helped raise money for first responders, schoolchildren and other causes.
But we can’t have those evil capitalists in the Mamdani government, so they’ll likely be replaced by union representatives.
And if the new board raises less money from Wall Street for charity? Mamdani doesn’t care; he’d rather tax them anyway.
What I find most fascinating about this is that Mamdani believes he can get away with it — and he’s right.
Despite rumblings about looking to relocate to Texas and Florida, the business community hasn’t fought back against his constant attacks by picking up and leaving.
My sources say banks, asset managers, law firms and the like might make some out-of-state moves, but they are largely staying put, hoping Mamdani and his socialism is eventually voted out of office.
“Most big businesses here are just sucking it up and staying,” one C-suite executive at a major Wall Street firm told me. “And nothing is changing.”
Consider: Ken Griffin was an early target of Mamdani’s class-warfare wrath with a tasteless and dangerous video posing in front of the Citadel chief’s pied-à-terre in midtown.
Citadel is headquartered in Miami, and Griffin rightly took offense to the stunt and had threatened to cut back on Citadel’s planned expansion in Manhattan into a new office tower on Park Avenue.
But the New York project will be completed and the expansion is largely intact, I am told. Steven Roth, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, Citadel’s partner, gushed Tuesday about the skyscraper’s potential in the land of Mamdani, calling Griffin “as our 60% partner, and Citadel as our 1 million-square-foot anchor tenant.”
“We are extremely excited and bullish about the potential returns from this project.”
Apollo Global is now in the process of setting up what has been described as a second headquarters in low-cost Austin, Texas. But my sources at the big asset management say it’s not looking to relocate from NYC; Mamdani’s city remains its official headquarters.
JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank, now employs more people in Texas than Gotham. But CEO Jamie Dimon, who has met with Mamdani and understands his lefty modus operandi, isn’t planning any big moves either. In fact, after their sit down, at JPM’s swanky new global headquarters on Park Avenue, Dimon vowed to work with our Marxist mayor, handing him a book on public-private partnerships.
Officials at the Partnership for NYC, including its chief Steven Fulop, are rightly incensed by the mayor’s attacks on business — the very people who pay most of the bills in this ever increasing welfare state. When I mentioned that businesses are not fighting back by leaving, he sent me a list of those who had left for Texas since 2015. It’s both shockingly short, and devoid of any big names that have the power to put a dent in the fiscal side of Mamdani’s socialist plans.
Will business ever wake up that they’re feeding the monster who wants to devour them?