Wall Street must work with a mayor it couldn't stop

Wall Street heavy weights failed to stop New York City voters from electing a democratic socialist mayor. Now what?

- Kevin T. Dugan

There was an air of defeat on Tuesday evening in New York's upper echelons as it became clear that Zohran Mamdani had won the mayor's race. Some top figures in the city's finance industry found the notion of a Mamdani administration unthinkable and had spent millions to elevate other candidates.

Now, they have to work with the new mayor—and hope that their worst fears about his impact on the city’s business climate won't come true.

“It's about public safety and quality of life more broadly. Those go in the wrong direction, and any employer is going to have a hard time attracting and keeping good people,” said Ed Skyler, an executive at Citigroup who was a deputy mayor under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Mamdani, 34 years old, has risen swiftly from an outer-borough backbencher in the state Assembly to election as the city’s chief executive by harnessing the broad unrest many New Yorkers feel about being priced out. He has promised an additional 2% tax on millionaires and to raise taxes on businesses to pay for free buses, expanded child care and city-run grocery stores.

Such policies didn’t sit well on Wall Street. At first, the odds of a Mamdani victory seemed remote, but his surprising Democratic-primary win in June jolted the finance industry into action. As the campaign heated up, firms such as Apollo Global Management and Citadel urged their employees to go out and vote. The hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman spent more than $2 million to stop Mamdani, though he was hardly the only one to throw money at less than competitive alternatives.

“He's spending more money against me than I would even tax him,” Mamdani said of Ackman during a podcast episode that aired recently. “Every day it’s like a million dollars, a million dollars—I don't even want that much!”