Tipsheet

Billionaire Targeted by Mamdani Fights Back Against New York's Tax the Rich Scheme

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  April 27, 2026 7:30 AM

On tax day, Zohran Mamdani announced that he was enacting a pied-à-terre tax on properties worth more than $5 million, whose owners do not live full-time in the city. He made this announcement outside the New York penthouse of Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel LLC. If Mamdani thought Griffin would just take his tax and his thinly veiled attacks sitting down, Mamdani was sorely mistaken.

Griffin is firing back, including vowing to pull billions in another investment project that would have created 20,000 jobs.

Right now, Citadel employs more than 2,500 in the city and they've paid more than $2 billion in taxes in recent years. But that's never enough for the socialists.

Griffin has also directed more than $650 million in charitable gifts to city institutions.

Here's more:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani was remorseless Friday about dragging billionaire Ken Griffin in a viral video promoting a new, proposed pied-á-terre tax.

Hizzoner dodged when asked if he had any regrets about calling out Griffin specifically in the video last week filmed in front of the Citadel founder’s 24,000-square-foot property on Central Park South, which he purchased for $238 million in 2019.

“That home, when it was purchased, was the most expensive home in the United States of America, publicly reported, and it was described as such,” Mamdani said when pressed by reporters during an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn.

“And in a political environment where there is always an attempt to describe any increase in taxes as if it would be one that would apply to all, we wanted to make very clear that this applies to a very select group of properties,” he said.

It was the latest volley in a back-and-forth with Griffin launched by Mamdani’s eyebrow-raising April 15 video, in which he boasted that “today, we’re taxing the rich.”

He then spotlighted the Florida-based hedge fund titan’s Manhattan penthouse as one that would be hit by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed tax on multi-million dollar secondary homes in New York City.

What will Mamdani do when the rich, like Griffin, leave New York City? He can't force them to stay, he can try — and fail — to impose exit taxes on them. He could even suggest seizing their businesses, but that'll fail, too.

They always run out of other people's money, as Thatcher said. And that's the problem.