Wall Street financiers greeted the news of Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City with a mix of trepidation and pragmatism.
In interviews on Tuesday, many described the election result as a threat to their business interests, but vowed to work with the new mayor. Others reacted to his ascendancy in more visceral terms, lamenting the victory of a democratic socialist who supports higher taxes and has expressed anti-Israel views.
Mr. Mamdani’s resounding victory showed that, in this election at least, the city’s business elites were not calling the shots. New York City’s business leaders spent more than $25 million on efforts to defeat Mr. Mamdani. Undaunted, some of them are already thinking about how they could blunt his most liberal initiatives, turning their attention to Albany, which has the power to block many of his proposals, like raising corporate taxes.
“Guys like me are definitely seriously considering making moves,” said David Modiano, a managing director at Thales Capital in Manhattan, who said he had already begun shopping for homes outside the city amid Mr. Mamdani’s rise.
Mr. Modiano, a Jewish immigrant from France, said he was principally worried about Mr. Mamdani’s enthusiastically pro-Palestinian views, and to a lesser degree the prospect of higher taxes and rising crime.
On a practical level, the business community is not only nervous about whether Mr. Mamdani will raise tax rates. They are wary, too, about the city’s relationship with President Trump, whose federal government controls a little more than 6 percent of the New York City budget and who threw his support behind Andrew Cuomo, who was running as an independent.
Ever since Mr. Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, the city’s business leaders have expressed concern about how his proposals would affect safety on city streets as well as the practicalities of many of his campaign promises, like freezing rents for the city’s one million rent-regulated apartments.
If anything, though, Wall Street is pragmatic. And many of its top leaders say they will look for ways to open a dialogue with Mr. Mamdani — and shape his policies. For some, those efforts started in the weeks leading to the election as Mr. Mamdani’s victory became evidently more probable.
“I don’t know how you can sit out on the sidelines and pout. Are you going to move? I don’t know. I’m not,” said Bess Freedman, the chief executive of Brown Harris Stevens, a real estate service firm. “I’m certainly going stay here and try to make the best of it.”
Ms. Freedman’s optimism, she acknowledged, was not infinite. Of particular importance to her is keeping the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, in the new administration. Mr. Mamdani has suggested he plans to do so, even as he also proposed expanding alternatives to traditional policing such as deploying teams of mental health professionals to certain emergencies.
“If he keeps Tisch in place — and she stays — and the police feel empowered to do the jobs that they need to do, and he works with everyone, the city will survive,” Ms. Freedman said.
“But if he doesn’t, and he starts to loosen the tools of law enforcement, and people feel unsafe, and quality of life goes down, and then it’s a new discussion for all of us.”
One top private equity firm has already been running the numbers to understand the financial impact to their business posed by the incoming mayor’s policies, an executive said. Mr. Mamdani wants to raise the maximum corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent up from 7.25 percent and put in place a 2 percent tax on those who make more than a $1 million.
The firm was already looking to move executives to cities like Dallas, Nashville, Tampa, Fla., and Charleston, S.C., building on a trend of transplanting workers as the cost of doing in business in the city rises. Those plans could now accelerate, that person said.
Ed Skyler, a senior executive at Citigroup, said that even before the election New York’s competitiveness had been in decline.
He said Mr. Mamdani would need “to figure out how to reconcile his affordability agenda with the need to reverse that trend so companies and their people feel confident in the City’s direction.”
A council of Florida business leaders plans to put out a statement Wednesday morning actively trying to court New York executives by promoting its “pro-growth environment and a commitment to opportunity,” according to a draft of the statement reviewed by The New York Times.
“I think a lot of business leaders are going to ask themselves where they can be successful considering the new laws and policies they may come up against,” said Stephen Ross, the billionaire developer who stepped down from New York-based Related in 2024 and began focusing on building out Palm Beach.
One idea that has already been floated among Wall Street donors — including some Democrats — is supporting a potential run for New York governor by Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican ally of Mr. Trump, three people familiar with those conversations said. The governor holds significant control over New York City’s fiscal matters, which these donors see as an important check on Mr. Mamdani.
Some of these donors were disappointed that Gov. Kathy Hochul endorsed Mr. Mamdani, and they liked Ms. Stefanik’s aggressive critique of the way universities handled antisemitism and campus protests over the war in Gaza. They also hope that Ms. Stefanik’s ties with Mr. Trump could ease relations between the president and the city.
But even some of Mr. Mamdani’s most virulent critics were looking to make inroads with their new mayor on Tuesday night.
“Congrats on the win,” the hedge fund manager William Ackman posted on X. “Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.”
Rob Copeland contributed reporting.
Lauren Hirsch is a Times reporter who covers deals and dealmakers in Wall Street and Washington.
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