Vornado CEO Steven Roth fires back at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for targeting Ken Griffin

Hours later, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC the same video had put him “in harm’s way,” invoking the 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson that occurred just blocks from his Manhattan home.

The comments from both Roth and Griffin are the turning point of a serious clash between City Hall and New York’s business establishment, with the CEOs personally calling out the new mayor and expressing distaste with the pointed remark at Griffin in his ongoing effort to tax the rich.

A Tax the Rich video on Tax Day

On Tax Day, Mamdani stood outside 220 Central Park South, where Griffin owns a penthouse he bought for $238 million, and announced the city’s first pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes above $5 million.

“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich,” he said in the video, which hit 52 million views on X. The tax, backed by Governor Kathy Hochul though it still requires Albany’s approval, would generate an estimated $500 million annually.

Vornado built the building which houses Griffin’s apartment, and holds a 36% stake in the joint venture with Griffin and the Rudin family to build a $6 billion, 62-story super-tall office tower at 350 Park Avenue, a project now hanging in the balance, which was referenced not only by Roth but Griffin’s COO at Citadel, Gerald Beeson.

“The ugly and unnecessary video stunt is personal to Ken, and sort of personal to me too,” Roth told investors on the call, according to The New York Times. “We are all shocked that our young mayor would pull this stunt in front of Ken’s home and single him out for ridicule.”

“We are about to commence the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, creating 6,000 highly paid construction jobs and supporting the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in mid-town New York,” wrote Beeson in a letter to employees. “The project—if we move forward—will entail more than $6 billion dollars of spending.”

On that building specifically, Vornado faces a mid-July deadline to commit to the venture or sell its stake to Griffin’s company. “Citadel has to be committed,” Roth said in the call, but added Vornado is expected to go “all in” on the project.

Roth told investors Vornado will pay approximately $560 million in real estate taxes to New York City this year, a figure he said places the company in the top three taxpayers in the city: “And that doesn’t begin to count the personal income taxes that I and our Vornado population pay to the city and state of New York. We work our a–es off.”

Vornado owns nearly 20 million square feet of Manhattan office space, is the borough’s largest street retail owner with 2.4 million square feet, and controls 10 million square feet in the area around Penn Station. It has invested $2.5 billion revitalizing that district over the past decade: redeveloping 5 million square feet of office space, creating 1.1 million square feet of new retail, and partnering on the Moynihan Train Hall. With tenants that include Meta, Samsung, Morgan Stanley, and Cisco, the company projected $275 million in capital expenditures for 2025, with billions more in the pipeline.

Roth compared the phrase “tax the rich,” when deployed with contempt by politicians, to “some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea.’” He argued the wealthiest 1% pay 50% of the city’s income taxes and “should be praised and thanked.”

Roth invoked Amazon’s abandoned HQ2 as a cautionary precedent, warned “this fence cannot be mended by a short, terse, insincere private apology,” and urged Mamdani to “begin every day being business-welcoming and business-friendly as his first priority.”

City Hall vs. the billionaires

Griffin, whose net worth exceeds $51 billion, said the safety dimension was what crossed the line.

“He seems to have forgotten that the CEO of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” he said on CNBC. At the Milken Conference he called the video “creepy and weird” and “frightening.” At the Norges Bank conference in Oslo, he called it “a profound lack of judgment.”

Griffin said at Milken the video confirmed his decision to “double down” on Miami, where he’s building a 54-story headquarters.

“We will add far more jobs in Miami over the next decade as an immediate and direct consequence of the mayor’s poor decision,” he said. (Griffin moved Citadel’s headquarters due to rising crime. He also had a public feud with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and his proposed graduated income tax).

In a statement to Fortune, Press Secretary Joe Calvello acknowledged Griffin as “a major employer in our City and a powerful figure in our economy.” He then added:”Mayor Mamdani wants all New Yorkers to succeed. That includes business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make this city the economic engine of America.”

“That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken. It rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink. The status quo is unsustainable and unjust,” the statement continued. “If we want this city to become a place that working people can afford, we need meaningful tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers contributing their fair share.”