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- Zohran Mamdani is projected to defeat Andrew Cuomo in the NYC mayoral election.It comes despite many major billionaires spending big to oppose him.Mamdani campaigned on a platform of free buses, free childcare, and a rent freeze.
It's official: Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City.
The Associated Press has projected that the Democratic nominee and state assemblyman will defeat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa in the city's closely watched mayoral election.
Mamdani was projected to win 50% of the vote when the race was called, less than an hour after polls closed. Cuomo held 41.4% of the vote, and Sliwa 7.7%.
Mamdani will be the city's first Muslim mayor. The 34-year-old is also the youngest person to be elected mayor of the city in over 100 years.
A self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani campaigned on a platform of affordability for working-class New Yorkers, proposing initiatives like free buses, no-cost childcare, and a rent freeze.
He won despite facing down millions of dollars in political spending from prominent billionaires in both the Democratic primary and the general election.
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Bill Ackman, Joe Gebbia, and Barry Diller were among the billionaires who collectively poured millions of dollars into outside groups that backed Cuomo and opposed Mamdani, who, for his part, has said billionaires should not exist.
Cuomo also won the support of two other major billionaires on the eve of the election: President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
"Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday night. "You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!"
"Bear in mind that a vote for Curtis is really a vote for Mumdumi or whatever his name is," Musk wrote on X. "VOTE CUOMO!"
That support wasn't enough to counter the growing momentum behind Mamdani.
A battle over the business of New York
Many of the critiques of Mamdani from the billionaire class revolve around the future of New York as a business hub.
To fund his ambitious platform, Mamdani has proposed raising the corporate tax rate and increasing the income tax on millionaires by two percentage points.
The result, some of Mamdani's wealthy antagonists have said, will be an exodus from New York, in terms of both businesses and high earners.
"Think Ken Griffin leaving Chicago for Miami on steroids," Ackman wrote on X following Mamdani's victory in the June primary.
Billionaire John Catsimatidis, who owns a chain of New York grocery stores, suggested he would move his office to New Jersey.
That fear has rippled beyond the billionaire class to other sectors, including tech, finance, and real estate.
"New York City is built on ambition, innovation, and capitalism," Bryan Rosenblatt, a partner at Craft Ventures, told Business Insider. "Electing a mayor who drives out our most ambitious builders and top contributors to the city's economy is not good for New York or anyone who calls it home."
In recent months, the icy relationship between the Mayor-elect and some of the city's titans of industry has thawed. Mamdani reportedly spoke with leaders like Point72's Steve Cohen and Paul Weiss' Brad Karp since winning the primary, and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said he will work with Mamdani if he is elected.
"I have to deal with the world I got, you know, not the world I want, and if he becomes mayor, so be it," the influential Dimon said at a conference last month.
And business leaders are more sympathetic to some of the Democratic nominee's proposals than others, Yasser Salem, a former McKinsey executive who's become a bridge between Mamdani and the business elite, previously told Business Insider.
"Some of them have said from the beginning that they understand policies like free childcare as a way to lower the burden of worry, concern, and issues that their employees have that prevent them from being productive at work," Salem said.
In fact, many of those rank-and-file employees in the financial sector supported Mamdani.
While 80% of higher-earning Wall Street workers — including investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and private equity bigwigs — donated to Cuomo and his affiliated PACs, Mamdani's campaign received almost 90% of the donations given from finance's back-office workers, such as those in operations, human resources, technology, and research.
"Even as someone working in finance, rent is crazy," one Mamdani donor previously told Business Insider. "The emphasis on affordability was especially appealing to me."
