Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC that his firm has begun shifting investments toward Miami in response to a viral tax-day video of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani yelling at a hedge-fund executive.
“In response to New York, we filed a permit in the city of Miami. We added several hundred thousand square feet of new space to our new building,” the billionaire told Sara Eisen of CNBC in an exclusive interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Tuesday.
“We’re going to add a lot of jobs to Miami over the next decade as a direct and immediate result of the mayor’s bad decision here, about him posting that video,” Griffin said.
He said Citadel’s decision to move forward with redeveloping the expensive Park Avenue building — which the company says will cost more than $6 billion and help create more than 15,000 permanent jobs — has become “a topic of debate.”
But “maybe we’ll get through.” [with] building when all is said and done,” he added.
He also said Mamdani’s video “put me in a tizzy,” referring to the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a midtown Manhattan hotel near his apartment.
“I don’t have long battles or issues or power” with the new mayor, Griffin said, yet he “turned me into a political puppet.”
“It just wasn’t good,” Griffin said. “It tastes really bad.”
Mamdani’s press secretary, Joe Calvello, in response to Griffin’s comments at the Milken conference, told CNBC in a statement Wednesday that the mayor “wants all New Yorkers to succeed.”
“That includes business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make this city America’s economic engine. That includes Ken Griffin, who is the largest employer in our City and a powerful person in our economy,” said Calvello.
“That does not contradict, however, that our tax system is broken. It rewards the extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink,” he said.
“The current situation is unsustainable and unfair. If we want this city to be a place that working people can afford, we need serious tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers paying their fair share.”
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took office in January, shared a video on April 15 introducing a new pied-à-terre tax — an annual fee for luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live in the city full-time.
This video was made outside 220 Central Park South, where Griffin in 2019 bought a bathroom for almost 238 million, breaking the record for the highest price house ever sold in the US.
The pied-à-terre tax “is specifically for the very wealthy — those who keep their wealth in New York City, but don’t live here,” the mayor said in the video.
“But still, they are able to make a lot of money owning property, I would say, the biggest city in the world,” said Mamdani.
“Most of the time these units are empty because they don’t live here either,” he said. “This is an unfair system that hurts New York workers. Now it has to end.”
Mamdani said the tax would raise at least $500 million “directly to the city.”
Griffin told CNBC on Tuesday that when he first saw the video, “I couldn’t believe what I was watching.”
He said the pied-à-terre tax “discriminates against a small group of people.”
“The decision we made without regret a few days ago is to expand the size of our office in our new headquarters in Miami,” he said.
“He knows what New York City needs and what New York state needs right now, a government that takes over a government that is wasteful, wasteful and puts a heavy burden on the lives of all New Yorkers,” Griffin said.
“I don’t think there is a city that should be arrogant enough to believe that it can’t deal with economic conditions and the hard truth that when people who drive success are told that they are not welcome or invited, they just leave,” he said.
