Zohran Mamdani Cost New York Big When His Tax the Rich Video Targeted One NYC Billionaire

Ken Griffin already proved he will walk away from a city that treats him like the enemy.

Now New York City's socialist mayor just made it personal.

And Griffin's response could cost New York something it will never replace.

The Video Mamdani Should Not Have Made

Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood on a Manhattan sidewalk on Tax Day and filmed himself pointing at Ken Griffin's 220 Central Park South penthouse.

The message was simple: people like Griffin have too much, and Mamdani is coming for it.

He announced a pied-à-terre tax – an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million – and named Griffin by name, calling out the penthouse Griffin purchased for $238 million.

Griffin's chief operating officer Gerald Beeson answered in a company-wide email.

Citadel, Beeson wrote, had been planning to redevelop 350 Park Avenue – a project expected to generate more than $6 billion in economic activity and create more than 15,000 permanent jobs in midtown Manhattan.

Then came the four words that should terrify every New Yorker who cares about their job: "if we move forward."

New York City Is About to Learn What Chicago Already Knows

Ken Griffin did not threaten to leave Chicago.

He left.

In 2022, Griffin relocated Citadel's global headquarters from Chicago to Miami, citing the city's crime and political climate. The firm went from roughly 1,300 employees in Chicago to a few hundred – from anchoring one of the city's largest skyscrapers to occupying barely two floors.

Chicago lost one of its most storied financial institutions, thousands of high-paying jobs, and the tax base that came with them – because Democrat leaders decided to treat job creators like the enemy.

New York is now staring down the same choice.

IRS data shows 892 companies left New York between 2020 and 2024, taking $47 billion in income with them. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned shareholders that New York carries the highest city and state corporate taxes and the highest individual income taxes in the country – and that his firm will keep moving more workers to places like Texas.

Dimon also raised a historical parallel your reader lived through: in the 1970s, nearly half of the 125 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in New York City packed up and left because the cost of doing business finally became unbearable.

What Mamdani Actually Told the Business Community

Mamdani's agenda is not a mystery.

He has said publicly that he does not think billionaires should exist.

His platform would raise New York's corporate tax rate, add a surcharge on high earners, impose a $30 minimum wage, freeze rents, and build city-owned grocery stores to compete with private businesses.

New York already lost nearly 5,000 net businesses in a single recent quarter – its worst stretch since COVID – while 72% of employers surveyed say they don't believe the state's economic conditions are good, and New York ranks 50th in the nation for both outmigration and taxation.

That is the environment Mamdani inherited, and his answer is to accelerate the policies that created it.

The Math New York City Cannot Afford to Ignore

Beeson's email was not just a threat – it was a balance sheet.

Over the past five years, Citadel's principals and employees paid nearly $2.3 billion in New York city and state taxes, while Griffin personally directed $650 million in charitable contributions to institutions across the city.

That is not the profile of a parasite.

It is the profile of a builder – one who was prepared to add 6,000 construction jobs and anchor a generational redevelopment of midtown Manhattan, until the mayor of that city decided to film a campaign video using his home address as a political prop.

Fewer than one percent of New York taxpayers fund more than 40 percent of all income tax revenue in the state.

The ordinary New Yorker's quality of life – the firehouses, the transit, the hospitals – is quietly underwritten by the very people Mamdani is declaring war on.

Mamdani has decided that targeting people like Ken Griffin is worth whatever they take with them when they leave.

Griffin is about to show him exactly what that tab looks like.

Sources:

• Hannah Nightingale, "Citadel CEO Ken Griffin may cancel $6 billion NYC project after Mamdani complains about his penthouse in 'tax the rich' video," The Post Millennial, April 23, 2026.
• "Billionaire Ken Griffin says Citadel's Chicago exodus was 'not hard,' cites crime, taxes," Fox Business, October 12, 2025.
• "New York City lost nearly 5,000 businesses last year: report," KOMO News, January 16, 2026.