Imagine being Ken Griffin. (It’s easy if you try.) You give millions of dollars to worthy institutions in a major American city. You pay hundreds of thousands in city taxes. You employ thousands of city residents. And then last Wednesday, you hear that the city’s mayor has mentioned you specifically in a new video. You might assume that he was singling you out for special commendation in light of your generosity and civic mindedness. But the mayor in question is Comrade Zohran Mamdani and the city is New York, so you’d be wrong.
Ken Griffin is the founder and CEO of Citadel, a multinational financial services company and hedge fund. He lives primarily in Florida, and that’s how he ran afoul of Mamdani, who singles him out for special criticism in a nasty, mean-spirited video posted on April 15, Tax Day.
In that video, Mamdani announces a new plan to tax pied-à-terres that are valued at over $5 million. (A pied-à-terre is a dwelling that is not the owner’s primary residence.) He gleefully predicts that this new tax will bring in over $500 million, which he says will be used to pay for “free child care, cleaner streets, and safer neighborhoods.”
Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich. pic.twitter.com/Wky2LFXC9W
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) April 15, 2026
The villain of Mamdani’s piece is Griffin. In fact, the arrogant young Marxist filmed this video standing outside the building that he said housed Griffin’s pied-à-terre. Whether or not this was public information before the video appeared, Griffin has every reason to believe that Mamdani has put him in danger by revealing where he lives at least part of the time. In today’s overheated political environment, there is no shortage of crazed leftists who would be happy to take care of Mamdani’s little problem once and for all.
The thing is, however, that Ken Griffin is not really a problem for New York City. The Washington Free Beacon reported Saturday that Griffin, along with legendary music mogul David Geffen, made a “joint $400 million donation to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2023. This constituted “the largest single donation the cancer center has ever received.” Griffin has also given “$40 million to the Museum of Modern Art, $40 million to the Museum of Natural History, and $15 million to the poverty-fighting Robin Hood Foundation.” The Free Beacon adds: “Sources tell us his gifts to city institutions total around $600 million.”
Then there is the fact that Griffin’s “Citadel and Citadel Securities together employ approximately 5,000 people,” and “is currently building Midtown’s tallest skyscraper right on Park Ave.”
This is, in other words, a guy whom Mamdani would be a fool, or a Communist intent on destroying New York City, to want to alienate. Mamdani says that the city is going to collect $500 million from his new pied-à-terre tax, but all that Griffin and everyone else is targets has to do to avoid it is sell the second place and find another one somewhere else.
Related: Mamdani Unveils Innovative Plan to Tax New Yorkers to Pay for Their Low-Cost Groceries
Then New York City will be free of the evil pied-à-terres, but the anticipated $500 million won’t be coming in, and there will be a budget shortfall. That tax revenue is going to have to be made up somehow, and with Griffin and his rich friends having left, New York’s rapidly shrinking middle class will have to shoulder the burden. If he actually opts to leave New York, Griffin could take Citadel with him. That would result in a massive rise in unemployment for the city, and those middle class taxpayers Mamdani will be relying upon to fund his socialist schemes in the absence of the rich won’t be middle class any longer.
Mamdani’s glee over his new tax will be short-lived. If he actively wants to destroy the city, he couldn’t possibly be doing a better job of it. In light of the fact that he is a convinced and determined Marxist, as Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani shows, it would not be surprising if he were working toward destroying the existing order altogether, so as to replace it with one that is more authoritarian and socialist at its foundations. In any case, whether he is or not, he has just given Ken Griffin, and the rest of us, an ugly display of the envy and greed that is at the heart of the socialist enterprise. It will not be the last time Mamdani shows us this.
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