Rich People Threatening To Leave New York If Mamdani Elected. Again.

As our people say, gey gezunt.

Oct 18, 2025

It never fails. Every election cycle, America is either blessed or cursed (depending on which side of the nation’s wealth gap you’re on) with at least one candidate who makes rich people lose their goddamn minds. Sometimes it is a legit left-winger with big plans to help the not-rich. (Think Bill de Blasio, the last left-leaning mayor to give New York’s wealthy elites the vapors.) Other times it’s a reasonable moderate who is comfortable around money but who nonetheless gets cast as a wild-eyed Marxist who will hang all the rich people by their toenails, dig out their livers, and make pâté for the poors. (Barack Obama, that wild-eyed radical, falls into that category.)

So it is with the 2025 New York City mayoral election. The Democrats nominated Zohran Mamdani, a reasonable guy with some fresh leftish ideas and rhetoric that centers the working people who make up the majority of the population of the Big Apple.

Naturally, this has sent some of the wealthy into paroxysms of angst. And now, according to the Wall Street Journal, they are threatening to leave the city if Mamdani is elected, taking their local tax payments with them, and won’t everyone be good and sorry when that happens:

In between sets, some women strategized about helping former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom they see as more palatable, pull off an upset. Others gushed about a recent New York Post cover depicting Gov. Kathy Hochul, who had recently endorsed Mamdani, as a devotee of Mao Zedong.

Kathy Hochul is so far to Mao Zedong’s right, she’s on his left! God, we are so tired.

As an aside, we really do love these “rich people will leave the city/country/planet if so-and-so is elected” stories. It’s good for our Imposter Syndrome.

The article goes on to note that the rich are “well aware” Mamdani’s program of free buses and city-owned grocery stores will need to be funded by someone, and that they are those someones. This freaks them out, as if taxes are going so high up that they won’t be able to afford their daily Jamba Juice that they send their assistants out to pick up for them.

So the city’s “titans of business” spent months trying to pressure Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Curtis Sliwa to drop out of the race.

Remember Bill Ackman? The billionaire who got offended that Harvard’s president didn’t answer his emails, so he decided all of Harvard should be destroyed in the dumbest way imaginable? Bill has since become more active in politics, which was the last part of life his reportedly insatiable ego needed to be exposed to:

Billionaire Bill Ackman backed Cuomo, before backing Adams, until he landed back on Cuomo. (Adams dropped out last month.) In a last-ditch effort, Ackman recently threw $1 million to an anti-Mamdani political-action committee.

Having watched Cuomo set that $1 million on fire, Ackman has now decided he’ll have to save New York on his own by challenging Mamdani to a debate. And he actually seems aggrieved that Mamdani had, as of Wednesday night, gone an entire day without getting back to him.

Anyway, where are all the rich people going, so that we may warn the citizens of those places?

“Every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, every pickup conversation, people are talking about—What are we going to do if he wins? Will you move to Miami? Will you move to your home in Bedford? Will you move to Israel?” Heyman said.

Good Lord, these people talk like Mamdani is really Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, encouraging the citizens of Gotham to rise up and overthrow the upper class.

The Journal did find one rich guy who is taking it in stride: