Ken Griffin called Zohran Mamdani’s controversial social media post outside the Citadel founder’s swanky midtown penthouse “creepy weird” and ultimately “frightening” after watching the socialist NYC mayor invoke Griffin’s name to tout a new tax plan on second homes of non-residents.
Griffin, who runs the Citadel Investment empire headquartered in Miami, was speaking at the Milken Global Conference, and conceded he watched the video three times.
“I mean like you literally look at the first time, you’re like, you gotta be kidding me. Okay?” Griffin said at the conference.
“And then the second time you’re like, you know what this is? Actually, this has gone from creepy to actually not really creepy, this has gone frightening.”
It was obvious Mamdani was trying to make him a target of the progressive left’s attack on wealth creators, including the proposed tax on non-residents with homes worth more than $5 million.
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In April, Mamdani stood outside Griffin’s penthouse on 220 Central Park South to promote the so-called pied-a-terre tax — a move that generated immediate backlash from the business community as a class-warfare stunt that won’t generate much revenue, could cause wealth creators to flee the city, and might stoke political violence.
Griffin cited the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot in 2024 while attending an investor conference in Midtown Manhattan by Luigi Mangione.
Griffin suggested such rhetoric by Mamdani stokes “political violence.”
“The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was killed just a few blocks from my house,” he added.
“And anything that creates, like an agitation of the extremists on either side of the aisle is a frightening dynamic.”
Before the stunt, Griffin had been planning a major expansion of Citadel’s footprint in the Big Apple, including thousands of new jobs that will generate billions of dollars in economic activity.
That is until Mamdani made him a poster child for his tax scheme.
Citadel has recently suggested it may rethink its expansion plans; at the conference Griffin said Mamdani’s pointed remarks has forced him to at least scale back on the New York City footprint and expand his build-out of the firm’s Miami hub.
Griffin famously moved Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, citing the city’s dysfunctional government and runaway crime.
“The mayor of New York has made clear to my partners and principally my New York partners . . . that we need to double down on our bet in Miami because we want to be in a state that embraces, business, that embraces education, that embraces personal freedom and liberty, and that embraces people having an opportunity to live the American Dream and a dream of earned success, not a dream of redistributive handouts that leave people dependent on government for their lives,” Griffin said.
This week, in a fireside chat here with me, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mockingly branded Mamdani one of his “realtors of the year” — predicting that New York City’s socialist mayor will continue to drive taxpayers, including Griffin, out of New York City and down to the Sunshine State.
Griffin, who has sparred with president Trump over economic policy, said he admires the president’s “resiliency” for surviving multiple assassination attempts.
“You know, I’ve had my differences with President Trump over the years,” he added, “but the idea that he has survived three assassination attempts is just, it’s just incomprehensible. I mean, could you imagine the state of mind that you would be in having survived not one, not two, but now three separate.”
