At a private home in the West Village on Tuesday evening, a cryptocurrency billionaire, a Qualcomm heir and a son of George Soros hosted a sold-out fund-raiser for Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s incoming mayor.
The next morning, Mr. Mamdani was off to TriBeCa, where a Hunt oil fortune heiress and a major cryptocurrency advocate held another fund-raiser for the mayor-elect.
Next week, he is slated to appear at a star-studded reception on the Lower East Side featuring Hollywood royalty, including Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Tituss Burgess and the director Mira Nair, who is Mr. Mamdani’s mother. The cheapest ticket costs $1,000.
Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the mayoralty with promises to take on modern oligarchs and lower living costs. But as he works to fund his transition and Jan. 1 inauguration, he is increasingly turning to some of his wealthiest benefactors — many of whom are his ideological allies — for help.
The Mamdani transition team said on Friday that it had raised more than $3 million to date from nearly 30,000 people, using contributions as large as $3,700 from wealthier donors to supplement thousands of smaller contributions.
The funds are supporting a transition staff that appears to be larger than those of his recent predecessors. Transitions involve sorting through thousands of résumés, laying the groundwork to lead the city and preparing for an inauguration. Aside from being given the use of a modest office near City Hall, Mr. Mamdani’s team is receiving little in the way of public support.
Mr. Mamdani has attracted far more small-dollar donations than is typical during mayoral transitions, and the average contribution to his transition committee in November was $88, the committee said. In contrast, the donations received by Mayors Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio during their transitions averaged more than $1,000 each.
Still, the rush of events with wealthy donors runs counter to Mr. Mamdani’s populist image and puts him in a relatively unfamiliar position. Because he attracted a flood of smaller contributions during his campaign, which were augmented by New York City’s generous public campaign-finance matching program, Mr. Mamdani managed to spend far less time on the fund-raising circuit than is typical.
Now, between transition planning meetings, Mr. Mamdani has been dialing donors and spending mornings and evenings glad-handing with the city’s wealthy, much as other politicians do. His aides do not include the events on his official daily schedule, but The New York Times obtained invitations to several of them from people invited to the events.
One such event, a breakfast fund-raiser on Nov. 25, was hosted by the best-selling fiction writer Adriana Trigiani near Union Square in Manhattan.
Tuesday evening’s fund-raiser, meanwhile, was co-hosted by Michael Novogratz, the billionaire chief executive of Galaxy Digital, a cryptocurrency investment firm.
And on Wednesday, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a left-leaning philanthropist and the Hunt family oil heiress, co-hosted a fund-raiser with a man who has been identified in the press as her partner, Marvin Ammori, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, at a private home in TriBeCa.
Ms. Hunt-Hendrix, Mr. Ammori and Ms. Trigiani did not respond to requests for comment. But Mr. Novogratz said in an interview that he and Mr. Mamdani met a few times during the campaign and that Mr. Mamdani asked him to co-host the fund-raiser.
Mr. Novogratz, who sits on the board of Robin Hood, an anti-poverty organization, said he wanted the Mamdani administration to succeed.
“I’m going to cheer for him until he does something I will really hate,” said Mr. Novogratz, who noted that he has four children, six siblings and 19 nieces and nephews who, like him, live in the city. “He’s not batting 1.000, but so far he hasn’t driven the car into the ditch.”
Mr. Mamdani has at least two events booked uptown next week, in addition to the celebrity-filled arts event downtown. One will be hosted by Neil Barsky, the former hedge fund manager who founded the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news site focused on criminal justice, and directed “Koch,” a documentary about the former mayor Edward I. Koch.
The current mayor, Mr. Adams, and his predecessor, Mr. de Blasio, raised around $2 million for their transitions from around 800 donors each. Mr. Mamdani has set a goal of $4 million, and wants to get there mostly through small donors — using social media to help make his pitch. (Transitions cannot raise funds directly from businesses.)
Mr. Mamdani appears to be sensitive to how the fund-raising may effect his carefully cultivated image as an ally of working class New Yorkers.
Incoming mayors typically use transitions “as an opportunity to rely on wealthy donors,” Mr. Mamdani said in a video posted online last month. “But that’s not us.”
On Thursday, Mr. Mamdani told reporters that the donors who spend time with him in private homes and event spaces would not have any more influence than everyday New Yorkers, contrary to the city’s long history of pay-to-play politics.
“We accept donations from anyone who’s interested in building a more affordable city for all,” he said, adding that at most fund-raisers he gave a brief speech on affordability and took selfies, and little more.
The Mamdani transition is required to file public disclosures on the first tranche of its donations by Friday evening. It said it had 84 paid staff members, more than prior transitions.
A vast majority of its budget goes toward funding office operations, the transition said, including staff salaries, office rent, and hiring lawyers to help conduct background checks for job candidates.
“There are volunteers that need to be fed. There’s a lot going on,” said Grace Bonilla, a transition co-chair. She said it was “a really expensive venture to make sure that we are setting up this mayor and any mayor for success.”
Part of the transition’s work has also involved dispensing with existing staff. Last week, it asked 179 workers at City Hall to quit by Jan. 1.
Though he is doing fewer public events than during his campaign, Mr. Mamdani has used his appearances to keep the public spotlight on his affordability agenda.
This week, for instance, he walked a Starbucks picket line with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a national progressive standard-bearer. The two met privately, too, along with Lina Khan, a former Federal Trade Commission chair who is another transition co-chair.
They gathered in a conference room labeled “Zuccotti Park,” in tribute to the Lower Manhattan plaza where the Occupy Wall Street movement took shape.
Transitions are traditionally divided between public-facing and private responsibilities. This one appears no different.
At the end of November, Mr. Mamdani announced the creation of 17 transition committees, populated by 400 New Yorkers, on topics ranging from community organizing to government operations. He invited the committee members to a museum in Upper Manhattan for a meeting that one attendee likened to a rally.
His campaign lawyer, Ali Najmi, took to the stage and asked attendees to sign nondisclosure agreements to protect the confidentiality of their ensuing discussions. While the request was not atypical, the nondisclosure agreement for Mr. Mamdani’s transition is five pages long; Mr. Adams’s confidentiality agreement was a single clause in a larger code of ethics agreement.
Some transition participants said they perceived their volunteer roles to be symbolic, part of a normal effort to portray a big-tent approach to governance. Others described the work as more concrete.
And while some committees, including those on technology and government operations, are not scheduled to meet until the week after next, others have already met.
The Committee on Community Safety, for example, met Wednesday, and engaged in discussion about Mr. Mamdani’s plans to create a new Department of Community Safety, one member said.
“It is not window dressing,” Ms. Bonilla said of the transition committees.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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