A self-described socialist mayor spent an entire campaign promising to tax the rich, won — and then, within weeks, went looking for the richest men in America to ask them, please, to stay. That much the post gets right. What it gets wrong is just as useful, because the cheap “billionaires fleeing the socialist” version lets everyone skip the part where this exodus started long before anyone said the word socialism.
Source: Gunther Eagleman on X — Mayor Mamdani and the Wall Street banks
The corroborated facts: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, elected on a “tax the rich” platform, met in May 2026 with top Wall Street figures — reporting places JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon among them, with sit-downs at JPMorgan headquarters and at Gracie Mansion. The reconciliation tour is real. The post’s headcount claim, though, is only half-right: JPMorgan does now reportedly employ more people in Texas (around 32,000) than in New York (around 24,000) — but that is not true of Goldman Sachs, which remains New York-heavy. So “JPMorgan AND Goldman, both bigger in Texas” is the poster’s framing, and it is partly wrong. We attribute it to him; we do not echo it as fact.
Translation: the mayor who ran against Wall Street is now Wall Street’s anxious host — and the “they already fled” story is being sold to you with numbers that don’t all survive a look.
The Socialist Folded Faster Than His Own Slogan
“Tax the rich” is a tremendous applause line and a terrible negotiating position, for one simple reason: the people being taxed can read a moving van brochure. Mamdani is now learning in public what every populist who actually wins eventually learns — that the wealth he campaigned against has legs, and the city’s budget rides on those legs staying put. The begging tour is not a betrayal of the slogan. It is the slogan, meeting arithmetic, in the first available conference room.
But The Banks Did Not Pack Up Because Of Him — And That Matters
Here is where the other side’s victory lap collapses. The right’s framing pretends New York’s financial decline began the morning Mamdani won. It did not. JPMorgan’s New York headcount has been sliding for years, and its Texas buildout predates this mayor by the better part of a decade. The big firms have been quietly diversifying out of high-cost, high-tax New York under mayors of every label and every party. “Look what the socialist did” is just as much a manufactured story as “greedy billionaires won’t pay their share.” Both are products. Both are for sale.
Here’s The Game Both Sides Are Running
The left hands you a villain: greedy billionaires fleeing their fair share. The right hands you a different villain: the socialist who wrecked a great city overnight. Both villains are convenient, and both are convenient for the same reason — they keep your eyes off the boring, bipartisan truth. A city made itself so expensive to operate in and so badly governed that even the industry it was built around quietly built its own exits — and it did that under Democrats and Republicans, progressives and moderates, for years. Mamdani did not start that drift. He just made it impossible to keep ignoring.
Watch The Feet, Not The Speeches
Ignore the mayor’s slogans. Ignore the bank CEOs’ polite statements after their polite meetings. Watch where the jobs actually walk. They have been walking toward Texas for ten years, under every kind of leadership, and one tax-the-rich speech followed by one please-stay dinner will not reverse a decade of arithmetic. The New Yorker who can no longer afford his own city is not served by either story you’re being sold. He is served by a city that costs less and works better — and right now neither the socialist nor the billionaire is offering him that.
