Mamdani’s Tax Day Vid Backfires as Businesses Look to Escape New York

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already having success in redistributing wealth, right out of his city.

It seems the socialist mayor’s creepy video celebrating Tax Day and directly calling out billionaire CEO Ken Griffin as a target for a new pied-à-terre tax may have backfired.

While the slickly produced video—where he gleefully spoke about taxing the “rich”—may have been good short-term politics, it could ultimately create a financial doom cascade for a New York City already facing a “historic” budget crisis.

According to a report in the New York Post, Griffin and other “billionaire bigwigs” are earnestly considering leaving the city, or at the very least looking to make future investments elsewhere.

“The splashy one-two punch of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and Apollo Global Management honcho Marc Rowan pledging to expand outside New York City has been coupled with a silent wave of businesses ‘quiet quitting’ the city over its hostile environment,” according to the Post.

Unsurprisingly, Griffin and other business leaders are looking to places like Florida and Texas for future investment opportunities.

“Now what the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and principally my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami because we want to be in a state that embraces business, embraces education, embraces personal freedom and liberty,” Griffin said at the 2026 Milken Institute Conference on Tuesday.

The New York Post reported that some business leaders are desperately trying to get others to stay in the city, but it’s not working.

It’s hard to blame Griffin and company for looking for trying to escape New York. As he noted in a recent interview, this isn’t just about money.

“What really upset me about [Mamdani’s] video was the fact that he put me in harm’s way,” Griffin recently said on CNBC. “You know, he seems to have forgotten that the CEO of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York. And to put any citizen in harm’s way is just inappropriate for one of our political leaders.”

Griffin was referring to UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot dead in the street. His killer has been glamorized by the bloodthirsty Left.

It’s important to note that it isn’t just the super-rich who are pulling up stakes from Mamdaniville. New York is experiencing a significant and accelerating exodus of residents. As a Citizens Budget Commission study noted, many of those departing had a higher income per capita than the people moving to the city.

But these residents aren’t just billionaires, far from it. They are middle-class people who ultimately must bear the burden of government funding that simply can’t be fully covered by exploiting the 1%.

That mass departure means lower tax revenues. And lower tax revenues mean that Mamdani’s lengthening list of government programs can’t get funded without further draconian wealth extraction policies. Hence the doom cycle.

Mamdani insists that he can find the money, but there’s no doubt that if businesses and residents continue to flee the city he’s going to eventually run into hard financial reality.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul already sort of learned this lesson as she once celebrated her opponents leaving the state and is now begging former New Yorkers to come back from Florida to pay for government programs.

What a great sales pitch, right?

What’s happening in New York, Seattle, and these other blue cities dabbling with socialism is only too predictable.

If your whole political pitch is that you can just give away free this and free that by taxing the rich, then you kind of need the rich, right? Gleefully celebrating how you are going to squeeze them dry or giggling at the idea that they may decamp for greener pastures is a fine way to accelerate the looming economic catastrophe.

Socialist countries often get around this problem for a while by simply making it difficult for people to leave, by stepping up the authoritarianism. I have no doubt many blue cities and states will try to do that in the coming years.

But they’re already running into the problem that their red state neighbors promise something better. They offer lower taxes, reduced cost of living, more law and order, and better government services to boot.

“Red states are racing each other to compete for growth—cutting taxes, slashing regulations, enacting government-union reforms,” Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel wrote on Thursday.

“By contrast, progressives are doubling down on taxes and redistribution. At least eight states now have a ‘millionaire’s tax’—several created in just the past year—while at least a dozen more sprint to adopt similar taxes. Blue states are promising even bigger handouts, more ‘crackdowns’ on business, greater union power, fewer cops.

Yep.

The Democrat “affordability” pitch has been nothing but a farce. New York City voters will pay the price for not figuring that out sooner.