Citadel growing in Miami vs NYC over Mamdani tax video
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC that his company has begun shifting investment to Miami in response to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s viral tax day video calling out the hedge fund chief.
“We applied for a permit with the city of Miami in response to New York. We added several hundred thousand square feet of new space in our new building,” the billionaire told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in an exclusive interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Tuesday.
“We are going to add a lot more jobs to Miami over the next decade as a direct and direct result of the mayor’s poor decision here regarding releasing the video,” Griffin said.
He said the Citadel’s decision to go ahead with an expensive redevelopment project of its Park Avenue building — which the company said would cost more than $6 billion and help create more than 15,000 permanent jobs — had become “a real moot point.”
But we’ll probably pass [with] building when all is said and done,” he added.
He also claimed that Mamdani’s video “put me in danger,” a reference to the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson near the penthouse of a midtown Manhattan hotel.
Griffin said she “didn’t have a long-standing fight, issue, or dynamic” with the new mayor, but that he “turned me into a political puppet.”
“It tasted bad,” Griffin said. “It tastes really bad.”
Responding to Griffin’s remarks at the Milken conference, Mamdani’s press secretary, Joe Calvello, told CNBC on Wednesday that the mayor “wants all New Yorkers to succeed.”
“This includes the business owners and entrepreneurs who have created good-paying jobs and made this City the economic engine of America. It also includes Ken Griffin, a major employer in our City and a powerful figure in our economy,” Calvello said.
“But that doesn’t take away from the fact that our tax system is fundamentally broken. It rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink,” he said.
“The status quo is unsustainable and unfair. If we want this city to be affordable for working people, we need meaningful tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers contributing their fair share.”
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took office in January, He shared a video on April 15 unveils a new tax, an annual fee on luxury properties valued at more than $5 million whose owners do not live in the city full-time.
The video was shot outside 220 Central Park South, where Griffin bought a penthouse in 2019 for nearly $238 million, breaking the record for the highest-priced home ever sold in the United States.
The mayor said the tax was “designed specifically for the richest of the rich—those who stash their wealth in New York real estate but don’t actually live here.” he said in the video.
“But they still get to reap huge financial rewards from owning property in the greatest city in the world,” Mamdani said.
“A lot of times these units sit vacant because, again, they don’t live there,” he said. “This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers. It’s coming to an end.”
Mamdani said the tax would raise at least $500 million “directly for the city.”
“I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” Griffin told CNBC on Tuesday when he first saw the video.
He said the tax “discriminates against a narrow group of people.”
“The one decision we have made with no regrets over the last few days is to expand our office footprint at our new headquarters in Miami,” he said.
“You know what New York City and New York state needs right now is a government that will tackle the bloated, wasteful government that puts an incredible burden on the lives of all New Yorkers,” Griffin said.
“I don’t think any city should be so arrogant as to believe that it is immune to economic realities and the hard, cold truth that if the people who bring success are told they are not welcome or invited, they will leave,” he said.
