New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s influencer operation is reportedly preparing to turn its attention from shaping the administration’s message to pressuring the city’s corporate leadership.
According to the New York Post, which cited two anonymous sources, Mamdani’s inner circle is planning a coordinated social-media campaign against prominent New York business executives to build public support for its proposed tax increases. The effort is also reportedly intended to pressure the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit business group whose member CEOs use their networks and resources to advance civic and economic initiatives across the city.
The effort would reportedly deploy the administration’s 200-person “influencer army,” including Office of Mass Engagement Director Tascha Van Auken and Director of New Media and Cultural Communications Emilia Rowland, to target and demonize prominent city executives, among them Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau, and other leaders affiliated with the Partnership for New York City, particularly the group’s new CEO, Steve Fulop, whom Mamdani’s allies reportedly view as more susceptible to pressure after succeeding longtime leader Kathryn Wylde.
Beyond generating public pressure on those executives, the campaign would help Mamdani build support for his tax-the-rich agenda, rooted in the familiar socialist premise that private-sector success is less an achievement than a public grievance. More importantly, it could convert that public pressure into political leverage, weakening the opposition’s ability, and perhaps even its willingness, to fight the tax increases.
Mamdani’s proposals include a two-percentage-point increase in the city income-tax rate on earnings above $1 million and a push to raise New York State’s top corporate-tax rate from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent. The stakes are substantial: the Citizens Budget Commission has projected that the city’s fiscal-year 2028 budget gap could reach roughly $13.2 billion.
“They have a plan to attack CEOs as they press for a slate of tax hikes,” one anonymous source told the Post, adding that Mamdani’s stunt outside Citadel founder Ken Griffin’s penthouse was no spontaneous bit of political theater.
“The Griffin thing was completely pre-planned,” the source said. “It was a test to see how the Partnership would react.”
City Hall has denied any such pressure campaign taking place, as Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said: “This is categorically false. The New York Post is publishing a complete lie.”
However, she refused to identify specific inaccuracies.
That pressure campaign follows Mamdani’s move last month to purge the advisory board of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a city-affiliated nonprofit that channels private donations into city initiatives. The fund has long served as a bridge between private philanthropy and public programs, allowing outside donors and corporate leaders to help finance projects without further tapping taxpayers. Mamdani dismissed the full business-heavy advisory board, an unprecedented move over at least the previous three mayoral administrations, and said he would replace it with a new slate of advisers.
The mayor had already reshaped the fund’s governing board by appointing, among others, a Bronx public-school teacher and a former longshoreman. The appointments appear to be Mamdani’s attempt to insert proletarian credentials into what has traditionally been a bourgeois network of corporate executives, financiers, and major philanthropists. But symbolic class warfare does not replace the relationships, fundraising capacity, and private-sector clout needed to solicit major donations for city initiatives.