There are louder billionaires, flashier billionaires, and far more ideological billionaires than Ken Griffin. So why did Mayor Mamdani choose to make this self-made success story his target?
Before casting Griffin as the poster child for “tax the rich,” consider the man himself. Ken Griffin is not a bomb-throwing ideologue. He is a longtime Republican donor but no Trump loyalist. He has publicly criticized the administration over policies he believed enriched connected families, distorted markets, and undermined sound economic governance. He retains something increasingly rare in American public life: independent judgment. Close enough to the President to be heard, but not so close as to be controlled by him.
In his policy critiques, Griffin has not made a habit of ad hominem attack. Even in his criticism of New York’s business flight, he aimed at the conditions that produced it, not at the private character of those caught up in it.
A policy wonk who still appears on panels across the country, Griffin built Citadel from a Harvard dorm room in the early 1990s. No inherited fortune, no dynastic safety net. His is, in the old-fashioned sense, a true American story.
Griffin, you will often hear him say, believes in education, merit, and giving ambitious young people a path upward. In an era that often treats elite institutions as either punchlines or expensive alternatives for YouTube education, he continues to invest in them. Most notably, he gave more than $2 billion in lifetime philanthropy supporting education, cancer research, the arts, and economic mobility in New York, Florida, and beyond.
Even today, when Griffin meets Harvard students, he still wears his name tag. He does not need to. That is precisely why the small habit matters: a sign of a man who has not forgotten the rooms he once inhabited. He makes McDonald’s runs, still, while helping build Miami into a destination for opportunity.
So why did New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani choose this billionaire as the visual centerpiece of his Tax Day video, filming outside Griffin’s record $238 million Central Park South penthouse as if wealth itself were evidence of wrongdoing? Is being wealthy and owning a penthouse a crime?
Of course it’s not.
The real answer is political convenience. Griffin is rich, Republican-coded, Miami-based, and in possession of spectacular real estate. He makes for an easy villain in a populist morality play. But politics conducted as social media theater often carries consequences beyond the frame. Turning a private residence into a political prop is not merely crude. In today’s climate of political violence and heightened tensions, it is reckless.
“It was just creepy and weird and actually frightening,” Griffin said at the Milken Institute Global Conference in response to Mamdani’s targeting of him.
Champagne socialism
Mamdani’s posture is familiar: a socialist critique of wealth performed from within a political ecosystem that depends on that same wealth. Billionaires are deplorable—except when they are donors. Private fortunes are obscene—except when they underwrite the right causes.
The irony is hard to miss.
This is not new politics. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth-tax campaign in 2016 named individual billionaires and financiers in ads and turned “Billionaire Tears” into campaign merchandise.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that “billionaires should not exist.”
Bernie Sanders has spent years warning of a “billionaire class” and an American government captured by oligarchic wealth.
One can agree with higher taxes on the wealthy and still see the pattern: the rich are not merely asked to contribute more; they are cast as moral offenders, symbols of social decay, and obstacles to democracy itself.
That may be effective politics to mobilize votes. It is also dangerous politics when it moves from policy to personal targeting.
Mamdani’s politics mistakes wealth for guilt. A lavish penthouse becomes an indictment. A fortune becomes a target. A businessman’s address becomes a political campaign backdrop. But a civilized city cannot conduct policy by pointing at windows. It cannot govern by converting private citizens into public targets and then pretending innocence when the crowd understands the cue.
New York needs more people like Griffin, not fewer. Not because every billionaire deserves admiration, nor because wealth should be immune from taxation. But because a city that drives away builders, investors, philanthropists, and employers does not become more equal. It becomes poorer, meaner, and more dependent on the class it claims to despise. And it is turning New York into a place of no opportunity.
The city’s real problems—housing shortages, budget gaps, strained services—were not caused by one man’s penthouse. They stem from decades of restrictive zoning, regulatory delay, underbuilding, and political choices that make new construction extraordinarily difficult. To suggest otherwise is to offer anxious New Yorkers a false villain rather than hard truths about systems and trade-offs.
I grew up in communist Yugoslavia. I know the music of this politics: the promise that everything will become affordable and humane if only the ambitious and successful are brought to heel. I also know the price. What was sold as equity became a ceiling on human potential.
Tito, the leader who denounced privilege, lived surrounded by luxury while speaking the language of the working class. Those contradictions never left me.
That history is what troubles me about Mamdani’s approach. Criticizing wealth is fair game; wealth should be taxed and held accountable. The problem lies in the performance—the tribune of the people pointing at someone else’s windows while implying that virtue belongs only to those who denounce success. I have seen where that instinct leads.
This is the old music of revolutionary politics. First, wealth becomes guilt. Then property becomes proof. Then a person becomes a symbol, and the symbol becomes a target. The Bolsheviks had the kulak aka “class enemies.” Mao had the landlord. The Khmer Rouge had the urban bourgeois.
Mamdani has no gulag and no firing squad, and America is not a communist state. But the instinct is recognizable: point to the successful man’s home, call it injustice, and invite the crowd to understand who is standing in the way of their promised future.
Mamdani may believe he is taking the safe route by targeting a Republican billionaire. He should think again. Democrats are watching as well, and precedents of this kind have a way of escaping their authors. Once public life accepts the ritual humiliation of private citizens as a legitimate instrument of politics, the box is opened for everyone.
New York has always thrived on tension: wealth beside poverty, ambition beside struggle. Its promise was never equality of outcome but proximity to possibility. That promise is fragile. It requires safety, order, confidence—and the belief that success will be taxed, yes, but not hunted.
The question is not whether Ken Griffin should pay taxes. The question is whether New York’s mayor understands the difference between tax policy and dangerous targeting of a private citizen.
On the evidence of that video, he does not. The line between “tax the rich” and “target the rich” is not merely semantic anymore when executives now live with real security threats. In a serious society, success should be rewarded, not vilified.
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