A CNBC anchor blasted far-left New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after he filmed a video touting a proposed pied-à-terre tax outside hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s Manhattan penthouse.
Shooting his section outside Griffin’s $238 million unfold at 220 Central Park South, a smirking Mamdani on Thursday declared, “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich.”
Hizzoner pointed to as much as the Citadel CEO’s house for instance of the type of luxurious property focused by his new “pied-à-terre tax,” including: “Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million.”
The video which was posted to Mamdani’s official social media accounts have gone viral, accumulating tens of thousands and thousands of views on-line.
Sara Eisen, a co-anchor on “Squawk on the Street” and “Money Movers,” warned the transfer dangers backfiring, noting Griffin “employs thousands of people in NYC” and is “investing billions more and creating thousands more jobs” — including that “making him feel unwelcome and demonizing him seems risky.”
“Ken Griffin employs thousands of people in NYC and is planning to build the tallest office tower on Park Ave., investing billions more and creating thousands more jobs,” Eisen wrote on X on Thursday, including that “[f]or that reason, he’s also here in NYC a lot, @NYCMayor.”
“Meantime Miami is welcoming him and his firm, with the massive jobs, investment and tax revenue he’s bringing,” Eisen wrote.
The Post has sought remark from Mamdani and Griffin.
Eisen stated Griffin relocated the headquarters of his hedge fund from Chicago to Miami “because of bad policy.”
The proposed pied-a-terre tax, unveiled by Gov. Kathy Hochul, would impose an annual levy on luxurious houses value greater than $5 million owned by non-full-time residents, concentrating on ultra-wealthy property house owners whose models typically sit empty.
When reached by The Post, Eisen expanded on her X put up, warning that whereas “there’s no place like NYC” the place companies “have strong and growing footholds here,” Mamdani and different left-leaning politicos “shouldn’t take that for granted.”
“The general attitude I hear from business leaders is ‘We can probably get through four years of anti-business policies, but the danger is the longer-term trend’,” Eisen, the veteran enterprise journalist, instructed The Post on Friday.
“Bad policies have consequences, as we’ve seen a migration of business out of California and into Florida, for instance.”
Eisen added that whereas New York “will always be special…it may not be as vibrant of a place for new offices and expansion in the future if we go down this path of demonizing them and disincentivizing them to be here.”
Griffin has deep ties to New York’s high-end actual property and enterprise world, headlined by his record-setting $238 million penthouse at 220 Central Park South.
At the time of the 2019 buy, it was the largest sum ever paid for a residence within the United States. There have been a number of houses which have listed for larger costs, however there are no verified closings as of Friday.
Griffin has since expanded his footprint with tens of thousands and thousands extra in purchases on the elite 740 Park Avenue.
He can be backing the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, a roughly 62-story, almost 2 million-square-foot supertall anticipated to price about $4.5 billion, with Citadel and Citadel Securities set to anchor the tower as his future Manhattan headquarters.
Griffin has lengthy tied his enterprise choices to issues about crime and the broader local weather in main Northern cities, warning in 2021 that Chicago was “becoming ever more difficult to have this as our global headquarters, a city which has so much violence” and likening situations to “like Afghanistan on a good day and that’s a problem.”
He later went additional, saying, “I’ve lived in a failed city-state” and recounting how “I had 25 bullet holes in the front of my building where I lived.”
Those issues — together with taxes and regulation — helped drive Citadel’s transfer to Miami, which Griffin has solid as a sharper distinction to struggling huge cities.
He has argued that in “Northern cities awash in red tape, people talk about crime and how bleak the future is,” whereas in Florida he sees “optimism in the air,” framing the shift as a part of a broader migration of capital and expertise to lower-tax, business-friendly areas.