New York City’s radical new mayor Zohran Mamdani — a proud, self-described socialist who somehow got elected to run the financial capital of the world — just posted a cute little Tax Day video bragging about his brand-new “pied-à-terre tax” on luxury properties worth over $5 million. And to really drive home the class warfare vibe, he specifically called out hedge fund titan Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse as Exhibit A.
“When I ran for mayor, I said I was gonna tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich,” Mamdani gloated on camera. Congratulations, comrade. You just taxed one of them right out of your city — and he’s taking six billion dollars with him.
See, here’s the part that the central-planning crowd never seems to grasp, no matter how many times it blows up in their faces: rich people have options. They have legs. They have private jets. And they have accountants whose entire job is to make sure guys like Zohran Mamdani never touch a dime more than necessary.
Ken Griffin — founder and CEO of Citadel, one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet — didn’t just grumble about the tax. He pulled the plug on a planned $6 billion investment in New York City. Six. Billion. Dollars. That’s not a rounding error. That’s skyscrapers, office space, thousands of jobs, and an ocean of tax revenue that New York will now never see.
And where’s all that money going instead? Miami.
Griffin doubled down on his 2022 decision to relocate Citadel’s entire headquarters to Florida — a state with no income tax, a governor who doesn’t treat success like a crime, and a general attitude that if you want to build something, we’ll get out of your way. “New York doesn’t welcome success,” Griffin said. That might be the most polite way anyone has ever described being mugged by a Marxist with a city seal.
But wait — it gets better. This wasn’t just Griffin making a point. He framed it as part of a “mass exodus of business leadership from California to Texas and Florida.” In other words, Mamdani didn’t just lose one billionaire. He reminded every other billionaire watching that the exit door is wide open and the weather in Miami is gorgeous.
This is the fundamental stupidity of the progressive tax-the-rich fantasy. They genuinely believe wealthy people will just sit there and take it. Like some hedge fund CEO worth $45 billion is going to look at a new tax on his penthouse and say, “Well, I guess that’s fair. Here’s my checkbook.” These people have never met a rich person in their lives. (Which is ironic, since they live in Manhattan.)
The pied-à-terre tax sounds great at a DSA meeting. “We’re going after the fat cats! They have $238 million apartments they don’t even live in full-time!” The crowd goes wild. Fists pump. Somebody starts a chant. And then two weeks later, the fat cat announces he’s leaving and taking a mid-sized economy’s worth of investment with him, and suddenly the city budget has a hole in it the size of the Lincoln Tunnel.
You want to know what’s really going to cook Mamdani’s goose? New York City runs on financial services. Wall Street isn’t just a street — it’s the engine that funds every subway car, every public school, every bloated municipal pension in the five boroughs. When you start telling the people who generate that revenue that they’re the enemy, they don’t argue with you. They just leave. And they don’t come back.
Griffin said he moved to a state that “embraces business, embraces education, embraces personal freedom and liberty.” Meanwhile, Mamdani embraces Karl Marx and TikTok press conferences. One of these approaches creates jobs. The other creates moving vans.
The beautiful irony is that Mamdani specifically used Griffin’s penthouse as his trophy kill — bragged about it on camera, practically dared the man to respond. And Griffin responded by making Mamdani the poster boy for why no serious business will invest in New York under socialist leadership. That Tax Day video is going to age like milk left on a Times Square sidewalk in August.
So congratulations, New York. You elected a communist to run your city, and he immediately chased away $6 billion in investment by taunting a billionaire on the internet. That’s not governing. That’s a teenager picking a fight with someone three weight classes above him and then acting surprised when he gets folded like a lawn chair.
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