Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC that the company began shifting investments to Miami after a Tax Day video of New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani criticizing hedge fund chiefs went viral.
“As a reaction to New York, we applied for a permit with the city of Miami to add hundreds of thousands of square feet of new space in a new building,” the billionaire told CNBC’s Sarah Eisen in an exclusive interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Tuesday.
“As an immediate and direct result of the mayor’s poor decision to post that video, we will add many more jobs in Miami over the next 10 years,” Griffin said.
He said Citadel’s decision to proceed with an expensive redevelopment of the Park Avenue building, which the company says will cost more than $6 billion and create more than 15,000 permanent jobs, has become a “real topic of discussion.”
But, he added, “When it’s all over, we’ll probably go through the building.”
He also claimed that Mamdani’s video “harmed me,” referring to the 2024 assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson near his midtown Manhattan hotel penthouse.
Griffin said that while he and the new mayor “have no long-standing conflicts, issues or power relations,” the new mayor “has turned me into a political puppet.”
“It was just in bad taste,” Griffin said. “It tastes really bad.”
Reacting to Griffin’s remarks at the Milken meeting, Mamdani city spokesperson Joe Calvello told CNBC in a statement Wednesday that the mayor “wants the success of all New Yorkers.”
“They include the business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make this city a powerhouse of America’s economy. They also include Ken Griffin, a major employer in our city and a powerhouse in our economy,” Calvello said.
“But that doesn’t negate the fact that our tax system is fundamentally broken. It rewards extreme wealth while pushing working people to the brink.”
“The current situation is unsustainable and unfair. If we want to make this city a place that working people can afford, we need meaningful tax reform that includes making sure the wealthiest New Yorkers pay their fair share.”
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took office in January, shared a video on April 15 announcing the new pied-à-terre tax. This is an annual tax on luxury properties valued at $5 million or more whose owners do not reside permanently in the city.
The video was shot outside 220 South Central Park, where Griffin bought the penthouse in 2019 for about $238 million, breaking the record for the most expensive home ever sold in the United States.
The mayor said in a video that the pied-à-terre tax is designed to target “specifically the wealthy, people who have amassed wealth in real estate in New York City but don’t actually live here.”
“Yet they can reap huge economic benefits by owning real estate in, dare I say it, the greatest city in the world,” Mamdani said.
“For the most part, these units remain vacant because, again, they don’t actually live here,” he said. “This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers. Now, this system is coming to an end.”
Mamdani said the tax would raise at least $500 million “directly to the city.”
Griffin told CNBC on Tuesday that when he first saw the video, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
He said the pied-à-terre tax “discriminates against a select group of people.”
“The only decision we have made in the last few days with no regrets is to expand our office space at our new headquarters in Miami,” he said.
“What New York City needs, and what New York State needs right now, is a government that takes on a bloated, lean government that places an incredible burden on the lives of all New Yorkers,” Griffin said.
“I don’t think any city should be so arrogant as to believe that it’s immune to economic realities and the hard, cold fact that if the people who drive success are told they’re not welcome or not invited, they’ll walk away,” he said.
