Transcription
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin took shots at New York City Mayor Zoron Mdani after Mum Donnie posted a video featuring Griffin's apartment last month. Monnie used Griffin's Manhattan penthouse as an example of the city's new wealthy tax or wealth tax on luxury properties that are not used as a primary residence.
"Just imagine this with me. A man spends three years, three years planning the most ambitious private development project New York City has seen in over a decade. We're talking about a gleaming new skyscraper in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Thousands of construction jobs, hundreds of permanent positions, billions in private investment flowing directly into a city that desperately, desperately needs it. No taxpayer money, no government handouts, no subsidies, just one of the most successful investors in American history, deciding that New York City is worth betting on again. And then he watched the election results come in and he made one phone call and just like that, gone. The jobs gone. The tower gone. The billions in private capital that would have flowed into New York City's economy. They gone. Not because the project failed. Not because the financing fell apart. Not because there was some technical problem with the permits or the zoning. Because of one man's election victory, who walked away? Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, one of the most powerful hedge funds on the planet. A man worth approximately 46 billion. And when he pulls out of your city, the entire world notices. Who sent him packing? Zoran Mdany, New York City's new mayor, barely a 100 days into office. And Mani's response to Griffin walking away. That's where this story gets dangerous because what he said reveals something about the direction of this city that should keep every business owner, every worker, every taxpayer up at night. There's one statement buried in Maani's response that exposes exactly what is coming for New York City next. And by the end of this video, you're going to understand why Ken Griffin didn't just cancel a building. He sent a message that every major investor in America just heard loud and clear. Trust me, it is worse than you think. And if you think this is just a New York story, stay with me because this pattern is spreading. Hit that subscribe button right now because this one goes very deep. I'm Daniel. This is New York Brief and let's get into it."
April 2026, New York City. Ken Griffin through Citadel's real estate arm officially withdrew from a landmark development project in Midtown Manhattan. A project that had been years in the planning stages. A project that would have added significant commercial and residential space to one of the most economically critical corridors in the entire country. The withdrawal wasn't quiet. It wasn't buried in some regulatory filing that nobody reads. Griffin made sure people understood exactly why he was walking away. He had already relocated Citadel's global headquarters from Chicago to Miami back in 2022. He had already warned publicly on record that progressive governance was making America's great cities uninhabitable for the businesses and investors that actually fund them. He had already watched Chicago spiral after years of similar policies. And then Zoran Mdani won the New York City mayoral race. And Griffin looked at what Mandani was promising. Municipal grocery stores funded by taxpayers. A 9.5% property tax increase, the largest in a decade. Open hostility toward private business. a governing philosophy that treats profit as a problem to be solved rather than an engine to be harnessed. And he made his decision. The Midtown Project was dead.
Now, you'd think that when a 46 billion dollar investor cancels a major development in your city, a city facing a 7.3 billion budget gap, you'd pump the brakes. You'd pick up the phone. You'd ask what it would take to keep that investment inside New York's borders. That is not what Mandani did. His response was defiant, almost celebratory in its dismissiveness. He suggested Griffin's withdrawal was proof that the city didn't need billionaires, that New York's future would be built by the people, not by private capital. And that is where this story stops being about one building and starts being about something much, much bigger.
To understand why this withdrawal is sending shock waves through every boardroom in America, you need to understand who Ken Griffin actually is. Because this isn't some real estate developer having a bad quarter. This is not a grudge move from someone who lost a zoning battle. Ken Griffin started Citadel out of his Harvard dorm room in 1987. He was 18 years old. He had a satellite dish installed on the roof of his dormatory so he could get real-time stock quotes. That is how obsessed with markets this man has always been. He wasn't born into finance. He built his way into it through sheer intellectual ferocity. Today, Citadel manages approximately $63 billion in assets. Citadel Securities, its marketmaking arm, handles roughly 25% of all US equity trading volume on any given day. 25%. That means when you buy a stock, there's roughly a one in4 chance Ken Griffin's firm is on the other side of that trade. He has donated over $1 billion to educational and civic causes. He paid $300 million for a copy of the United States Constitution, the most ever paid for a historical document, because he believes in what America was built on. He's not a man who throws money around carelessly or makes decisions emotionally. When Ken Griffin pulls out of a city, he has done the math. He has looked at the regulatory environment, the tax trajectory, the political direction, and the long-term return on investment. And he has concluded that the numbers don't work.
And here's what makes this so much bigger. The one billionaire's real estate decision. Griffin leaving Chicago didn't happen in isolation. After he moved Citadel to Miami, Boeing moved its headquarters out of Chicago. Caterpillar moved out. Tyson Foods moved out. When a signal fire gets lit by someone of Griffin's stature, other companies follow. They watch, they calculate, and they move. New York City is now watching that same fire get lit on its own doorstep. And Griffin isn't alone. Not even close. The real estate board of New York, representing the developers, landlords, and investors who collectively own much of the city's physical infrastructure, has been sounding alarms since before Mandani took office. The proposed property tax increase doesn't just hit homeowners. It cascades. Landlords pass it to commercial tenants. Commercial tenants pass it to consumers. Every bodega, every small restaurant, every independent retailer absorbs that cost increase and either raises prices or closes. James Patchet, a former head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, publicly warned that the city's approach to private capital was creating a chilling effect on investment decisions across the board, not just in real estate, in technology, in financial services, in every sector where companies choose where to plant their flag. The Partnership for New York City, which represents the CEOs of the city's largest employers, released data showing that business confidence in New York's long-term trajectory had dropped to its lowest point since the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Then there's the banking sector. Several major financial institutions have quietly begun accelerating their contingency planning for operations in other cities. Miami, Dallas, Nashville, cities that are aggressively recruiting New York's financial sector with lower taxes, less regulation, and governments that treat private investment as an asset rather than an adversary.
Here's the fundamental problem that nobody in city hall wants to address directly. New York City's entire public sector, its schools, its hospitals, its transit system, its social services, is funded by the tax revenue generated by private businesses and the people who work in them. When those businesses leave, the revenue doesn't just shrink, it collapses in ways that take years to rebuild. And the people who get hurt first are not the billionaires who can afford to move. They're the checkout clerks, the security guards, the building maintenance workers, the food delivery drivers, the people who need the jobs that private capital creates. That's not protecting working people. That's abandoning them.
So, while calling it progressive, let me make this real for a second. Just imagine this. You're a 34year-old construction worker in the Bronx. You've been in the union for 8 years. You've got two kids in public school and a wife who works as a home health aid. The Midtown Project Griffin just canled. That was 18 months of guaranteed work for people exactly like you. Work that would have paid union wages with benefits with pension contributions. work that would have meant the difference between keeping up with rent increases or falling behind. That job doesn't exist now. Not because the economy collapsed, not because there was a recession, because the election results scared away the man with the checkbook. Now, multiply that across every project that doesn't get announced. Every office tower that gets built in Miami instead of Midtown. Every tech company that opens its East Coast hub in Nashville instead of Brooklyn. Every financial firm that chooses to expand in Dallas rather than downtown Manhattan. You don't see those jobs disappear because they were never created. There's no headline. There's no press conference. There's just a slow, steady drain of economic opportunity from a city that used to be the place everyone wanted to be.
And here's the crulest irony of all of this. Mani says he's governing for working people. He says the billionaires had their turn. He says New York's future belongs to the community, not the investor class. And on the surface, on the absolute surface, it sounds like standing up for the little guy. But ask that construction worker in the Bronx how he feels about losing 18 months of union work. Ask the restaurant owner near the wouldbe development site who was counting on the foot traffic from thousands of new office workers. Ask the small business owner who needs commercial rents to stabilize, which only happens when there's competition among developers to attract tenants, what Mamani's vision of a billionaire free New York actually looks like from street level. How do you build a city without builders? You don't. You just watch it slowly hollow out while the people who could least afford to leave are the ones who end up staying behind.
Now, here's where this story shifts from concerning to genuinely alarming. Because Mammdani didn't respond to Griffin's withdrawal with any acknowledgement that losing a major private investment might be a problem worth addressing. There was no outreach, no invitation to renegotiate, no honest reckoning with what it means when capital of that magnitude decides your city isn't worth the risk. Instead, Mani framed Griffin's departure as a feature, not a bug. He suggested that New York didn't need investors who weren't committed to the city's values. He doubled down on the municipal grocery store plan. He continued pushing the property tax increase through city council despite the council speaker publicly rejecting it. He called Moody's downgrade of the city's credit outlook, the first since the pandemic, premature. He blamed the $7.3 billion budget deficit entirely on his predecessor. And then he said something that should be quoted, analyzed, and remembered by every person who owns a business, works for a business, or depends on a business in the city. He said, "New York's strength has never come from its billionaires."
I want to sit with that for a moment because it's not just wrong. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how cities actually function, how tax bases work, how jobs get created, how economic ecosystems sustain themselves. New York City collects approximately 4.7 billion annually just from its personal income tax on high earners, people making over $1 million a year. The top 1% of income earners in New York City pay roughly 43% of all personal income taxes collected by the city. 43% from 1% of the population. When Griffin left Chicago, Illinois lost an estimated $200 million annually in tax revenue within two years. Not from Griffin alone, from the ripple effect of the businesses and employees who followed. You cannot replace that math with a municipal grocery store. This isn't a values debate. This is arithmetic. And the city's own controller has said the numbers don't work.
Now, remember at the beginning of this video, I told you there was a number buried in this story that nobody in city hall wants you to see clearly. Here it is, $9 billion. That is the estimated total economic output, direct and indirect, that the canceled Midtown project would have generated over its construction and first decade of operation. Construction spending, permanent jobs, retail activity, property tax revenue, income tax from workers, supplier contracts, everything. nine billion dollars of economic activity that New York City just lost. Not because of a recession, not because of a natural disaster, because one election made one investor decide the math didn't work. 9 billion. For context, Mandani's municipal grocery store program, all five stores across all five bureaus, is budgeted at 70 million. And the first store alone is already projected to cost $30 million, nearly half the entire budget. A Manhattan Institute analysis found a standard 25,000 foot grocery store should cost roughly $15 million to build, even accounting for New York's sky-high union construction costs. So where is the other $15 million going? Nobody's answering that question. But here's the comparison that should stop you cold. The city is spending $30 million in public money to build one government store. A store that will pay no rent, no property taxes, and will actively undercut the private businesses that do fund this city while simultaneously losing $9 billion in private economic activity because the political environment scared away the investor who would have generated it. $30 million in, $9 billion out. That is the trademi's first 100 days has produced for New York City.
And it gets worse. Moody's revised the city's credit outlook from stable to negative. The city's operating surplus collapsed by 94% in a single year. Revenue is growing at 2%. Spending is growing at 4.5%. The city is burning through financial flexibility at a rate that its own controller, Mark Lavine, called the worst fiscal challenge he had ever seen. And Lavine is not a political opponent. He's a member of the same Democratic party. The math doesn't work. It doesn't work today. It doesn't work next year. And the longer private investment continues to flee, the worse those numbers get. Because you cannot tax your way to prosperity when the people you're taxing are packing their bags.
Now, here's the part that expands this beyond New York. And I need you to hear this clearly because this is not just a New York story. Not anymore. The pattern is the same in every city where this playbook has been run. Chicago. When progressive governance accelerated in Cook County, higher taxes, increased regulation, hostility toward corporate headquarters, the city lost Boeing, Caterpillar, Tyson, Citadel, and dozens of smaller firms in a 5-year span. Chicago's downtown office vacancy rate hit 25% in 2024. Property values in the loop declined. The tax base that funded the social programs that were supposed to make life better for working people eroded faster than the programs could expand. San Francisco. The city spent years treating its tech sector as an inexhaustible ATM. Higher taxes, aggressive regulation, a political climate that was openly contemptuous of the industry that was generating the city's wealth. What happened? Salesforce, Twitter, Oracle, HP all moved their headquarters or significantly reduced their San Francisco footprint. The city's downtown office vacancy rate reached 36% in 2024, the highest of any major American city. Tax revenue collapsed. The very services that were supposed to protect working people got cut. Seattle, Portland, the pattern repeats every time. And now New York City, the financial capital of the world, the city that has always been able to absorb mistakes because its economic gravity was simply too powerful, is watching a $46 billion investor, announce publicly that the political environment has made the numbers not work. Atlanta is now actively courting New York's financial sector. Dallas has a dedicated recruitment team targeting New York firms. Miami's financial district has grown by 40% in the past four years and a significant portion of that growth came directly from New York. The question is not whether this is happening. It is happening right now in real time. The question is whether anyone in city hall is willing to look at the math honestly and change course. And based on Mammdani's response to Ken Griffin walking away, based on the doubling down, the defiance, the dismissiveness, the answer right now appears to be no.
Now, I want to be completely straight with you here because this channel is not about cheerleading for billionaires. And before the comments fill up, with one side calling me a socialist and the other side calling me a corporate shill, let me be direct. Ken Griffin is not a victim. A man worth $46 billion who cancels a real estate project and moves on has not suffered. He will be fine. He is fine. He was fine before this story started and he will be fine long after New York City has figured out what it wants to be. And there are real problems with New York's grocery market, its housing affordability, its cost of living for working families. Those problems are genuine. They are serious. People are struggling in ways that deserve real policy solutions, not dismissal. But here's where both sides fail. The actual human beings trying to live their lives in this city. Namdani's approach, treating private investment as the enemy, celebrating when billiondoll projects walk away, spending $30 million on a single government store while the budget collapses, does not help the Bronx construction worker. It does not help the bodega owner in East Harlem. It does not help the young family paying $3 to $200 a month for a two-bedroom apartment after the property tax increase gets passed straight through by their landlord. It helps no one except the political brand of a mayor who wants to look like he's fighting billionaires while the city he's supposed to run quietly deteriorates. And the private sector answer, "Deal with it." As Katamatus told struggling families when asked about high grocery prices is equally useless. If the largest independent grosser in Manhattan's response to genuine affordability concerns is, "Deal with it," then the private sector has handed the moral argument to the government on a silver platter. You don't get to complain about government overreach when your public posture is contempt for the people you're serving. Ordinary New Yorkers deserve better than a mayor who celebrates losing $9 billion in investment and a billionaire grosser who tells them to deal with high prices. They deserve honest governance, realistic economics, and political leaders who understand that a thriving private sector and genuine public investment in working people are not opposites. They are partners. They have always been partners. And the moment a city forgets that, the clock starts ticking.
So, let's bring it all the way back. We started with a man spending three years planning a project that would have employed thousands of New Yorkers, generated $9 billion in economic activity, and planted a flag of private confidence in a city that desperately needs exactly that signal right now. No taxpayer money, no subsidies, just private capital deciding that New York City was worth the bet. And then one election happened and Ken Griffin did the math. in New York City lost $9 billion not in a crash, not in a crisis, but in a single investment decision made by a man who decided the political environment had made the numbers not work. And the mayor's response was to call it a win. Here's the bottom line. You cannot run a $100 billion municipal budget on ideology alone. You cannot close a $7.3 billion deficit by celebrating when private investors leave. You cannot build affordable housing without builders. You cannot create jobs without job creators. You cannot fund the schools, the hospitals, the transit system, the social safety net. None of it without the tax revenue that private economic activity generates. Namani can call it progressive. He can call it putting people over profits. He can frame every departing investor as proof that New York is finally standing up for its values. But the construction worker in the Bronx who just lost 18 months of union work doesn't care what you call it. The bodega owner in East Harlem, watching a government store open around the corner, a store that pays no rent, no taxes, no fees, while he's barely making margin, doesn't care what you call it. The young family whose rent just jumped $200 a month because the property tax increase got passed straight through by their landlord doesn't care what you call it. They care whether it works. And right now, the math says it doesn't.
New York City has survived recessions, pandemics, fiscal crises, terrorist attacks, and decades of political dysfunction. It is one of the most resilient urban economies in human history. But every one of those recoveries was built on the same foundation. Private capital flowing in, businesses choosing to plant their flags here, investors deciding that New York was worth the bet. The moment that calculus flips, the moment more investors are leaving than arriving, more businesses are relocating than opening, more employers are calculating the cost of staying versus the cost of going, that is the moment the spiral becomes very hard to stop. And Ken Griffin just told the entire investment world that for him, for right now, the calculus has already flipped. Whether Mandani course corrects before others follow, that is the most important economic question facing New York City today. And so far, in the first 100 days, the answer has not been encouraging.
So, I want to hear from you right now in the comments below. Do you think New York City can afford to lose major private investment and still fund the services working people depend on? Or is this the beginning of the same spiral we've already watched destroy Chicago and San Francisco? And if you're in New York, if you're a small business owner, a construction worker, a renter, watching your costs go up, I want to hear your experience directly. Not the political spin, your actual life. Drop it in the comments because this conversation matters and your voice belongs in it. If this video connected some dots that needed connecting, hit that like button. It genuinely helps this channel reach more people who need to hear this analysis. Subscribe to New York Brief for more deep dives into the stories that actually affect your wallet, your neighborhood, and your future. Hit the notification bell so you don't miss what's coming next. I'm Daniel. Stay sharp, stay informed, and never stop asking who actually pays the bill.