New York’s Billionaires Are Bending the Knee to Zohran Mamdani

Boy does it feel good in New York City. On Tuesday night, just over 30 minutes after polls closed, Zohran Mamdani won the election to become the city’s next mayor. To do so, he overcame substantial political headwinds: The man who will be our first Muslim mayor was constantly tarred as an antisemite and, as too often seems to follow, was subject to an undercurrent of Islamophobic attacks about “sharia law” and “global jihad” throughout the race. Mamdani also faced the city’s ruling class of millionaires and billionaires, who engaged in some heartwarming class solidarity by spending tens of millions against him and vowing to flee the headquarters of global capital if he won, which perhaps motivated ordinary New Yorkers to turn out to support the mayor-elect. In other words, the New York assembly member stared down the ruling class and still won.

In a stunning turn of events, many of those high-class naysayers have come right back around to offer a helping hand in governing the city, effectively bending the knee to the man they cast as an existential threat.

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Chiefest among these converts is billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman, who famously contributed nearly $2 million of his own money to efforts to kill Mamdani’s candidacy and warned on social media that the city would “become much more dangerous and economically unviable” after Mamdani routed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June Democratic primary. In that same Twitter tome, Ackman promised there were “hundreds of million of dollars of capital available” if the right candidate would simply throw his hat in the race, and reduced the democratic will of the people to a plug-and-play scheme where this mythical person would be able to defeat Mamdani simply by running Michael Bloomberg’s “how-to-win-the-mayoralty IP.” (It’s well worth noting that New York saw the highest turnout in a mayoral election in more than 50 years.) As a result, it was with no small measure of glee that I read the Pershing Square Capital boss’s tweet on Tuesday night at-ing Mamdani: “congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.” A rival billionaire hedge fund guy responded by calling this olive branch “gimp-like.” If that’s what it takes, so be it!

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Elsewhere in the world of high finance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who previously called Mamdani “more a Marxist than a socialist” and slammed him as pushing “ideological mush that means nothing in the real world,” is also offering his help. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Dimon urged Mamdani to call up the outgoing mayor of Detroit for advice because “that’s the way you learn,” which is more than a little bit condescending. The billionaire also said he left a message for Mamdani the day after the election and selflessly offered to meet with him: “If I find it productive, I’ll continue to do it.” (The mayor-elect, for his part, responded that he’d take the CEO up on the offer, despite not agreeing across “every single issue.”) With all due respect, New York City is not Detroit, a city that was hollowed out by corporate flight, and Dimon, whose bank has invested $2 billion in that city’s recovery, seems to know this full well. Detroit “wasn’t like New York, which is kind of healthy,” he told CNN. That’s a real understatement, especially for the ultra-wealthy.

Elsewhere, the crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz urged his countrymen to reach out to Mamdani. “Once he’s the mayor, we’ve got to be sure he’s successful in keeping New York a thriving community,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, a “community” for whom Novogratz did not say. “He’s tapping into a message that’s real: that we’ve got a tale of two cities in the Dickensian sense, to a degree we haven’t seen since we’ve been alive, and can you address the affordability issue in creative ways without driving business out.” The crypto industry might mourn the booster it had in the outgoing mayor, but something tells me “business” at large is going to be alright.

This isn’t to say everyone at the top has gracefully accepted the results. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, whose company was severely affected by new city rules limiting short-term rentals and who donated $2 million total to two anti-Mamdani super PACs, hasn’t publicly reacted to the news. Bloomberg, the former mayor who poured $5 million into fighting the red menace, has also stayed quiet. Crashouts abounded lower on the tax bracket as well.

It remains to be seen how Mamdani will govern and how big business will respond. Many onlookers have been eager to point out that the facts of governance and the world as it exists today will likely involve compromises and, as a result, disappointments. I’m sure many New Yorkers would love for Mamdani to leave these billionaires on read for all eternity, but New Yorkers are not known for their naiveté. It’s still a giddy feeling to see the masters of the universe sweat and prostrate themselves, if only for now. Our lame-duck, court-jester mayor got at least one thing right during his tenure: The haters truly do become your waiters at the table of success.