Billionaire Ken Griffin Clashes with NYC Mayor Mamdani over Taxes and Crime, Echoing Chicago Exit

Billionaire Ken Griffin is on a collision course with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over taxes on the ultra-wealthy and rising crime, repeating the disputes that prompted him to relocate Citadel from Chicago to Miami in 2022.

Griffin, whose fortune Forbes pegs at about $50 billion, pulled the hedge fund's global headquarters out of Chicago after more than 30 years there. The move slashed the local office from roughly 1,300 employees to a few hundred, with more staff heading south. It cost the city jobs, investment and a key financial player that bolstered its status as a global hub.

Griffin told a New York conference on Oct. 6 that convincing employees to leave Chicago for New York or Miami proved simple. "Chicago, over the past six or seven years, has been engulfed in a series of problems," he said, naming crime as a top issue alongside economic and policy woes that drove workers away. "I think the sad part of the story is how many people who had built lives in Chicago were willing to walk away from that and move to Miami or New York, just given the challenges that Illinois has faced."

Chicago lost office space, high-paying finance jobs downtown and a philanthropist who donated hundreds of millions to local institutions and politics.

The pattern now plays out in New York. Tensions mirror Griffin's rift with then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. It started with Mamdani's viral April 15 video pushing a tax on second homes over $5 million. Shot outside Griffin's 24,000-square-foot Central Park South penthouse, bought for a record $238 million, the clip named him directly. "This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million, whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million," Mamdani said.

Griffin labeled the video "creepy and weird" at the Milken Institute Global Conference on April 6, saying he watched it three times. On Citadel's planned $6 billion office tower at 350 Park Avenue, he said the firm is rethinking it while pressing ahead with Miami growth, which he deemed "unquestionably" correct.

Florida and other Republican-led states court businesses and high earners with low taxes.