Jeff Bezos has a message for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani: The villain strategy won’t work.
In an interview with CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wednesday, the Amazon founder weighed in on the viral Tax Day video that Mamdani filmed outside Citadel CEO Ken Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse—a stunt designed to build public support for a proposed pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. Bezos said the move reflected a time-honored but ultimately hollow political tactic.
“When you don’t know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them,” Bezos told Sorkin on Squawk Box. “But it won’t solve the problem. The only thing that will solve the problem is skill.”
Bezos, who owns a residence in New York City and would himself likely be subject to the proposed tax, notably did not oppose the policy. He called a pied-à-terre tax “a fine thing for New York to do,” comparing it to hotel taxes—levies on out-of-towners that tend to be popular precisely because they fall on people who can’t vote against them. “If you raise the hotel taxes too much, tourists stop coming,” he said. “So you have to be judicious.”
But Bezos drew a firm line between the policy debate and what he called the unjustified targeting of Griffin personally. “The second piece, which is not so good, is to go stand in front of Ken Griffin’s house and act like he’s some kind of villain,” he said. “Ken Griffin isn’t a villain. He hasn’t hurt anybody. He’s not hurting New York. In fact, quite the opposite.”
