The Uber Lobbyist Who Wants to Take Down Bill de Blasio

The warrior for Bloomberg and Uber really, really doesn’t like Bill de Blasio.

- Simon van zuylen-wood

"Crickets have very short life spans,” Bradley Tusk tells me. We are standing in front of the Petco near Union Square, where he is considering purchasing a handful of Acheta domesticus for his 7-year-old son’s pet frog. “I’m there like once a week buying crickets. With all the innovations in technology, there still isn’t an easy way to have someone bring you live crickets. We tried with TaskRabbit. They were like, ‘No, we don’t deal with live animals.’ ”

Tusk, who lives three blocks away, is sensitive to the inconveniences of city life. His lobbying-consulting shop, Tusk Strategies, was the driving force behind Uber’s beat down of Mayor de Blasio’s proposed cap on for-hire vehicles. Tusk’s entire client list, for that matter, can seem like a mayoral troll job. Earlier this year, he signed on to represent the unwaveringly anti–de Blasio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union. The 42-year-old’s latest mission, fueled by start-up righteousness, is to dethrone the mayor himself. “It seemed to me that people in the business community and the tech community and the education-reform community were all complaining incessantly about de Blasio,” says Tusk, a Michael Bloomberg loyalist who ran the former mayor’s 2009 reelection bid. “About how bad of a mayor he is, how corrupt he is, how lazy he is. But nobody was doing anything about it.”