There’s a good argument to be made that Mayor Zohran Mamdani should not have gone to war with Ken Griffin, the hedge-fund billionaire and one of the wealthiest men on earth. As Mamdani was celebrating a potential agreement in Albany to tax luxury second homes, he cut a widely viewed video that called out Griffin, noting that his $238 million penthouse would be subject to the new tax. Mamdani, to underscore his point about the “fundamentally unfair” New York tax system, shot the clip outside Griffin’s luxury skyscraper in Manhattan.

Griffin, in the weeks since, has been on the warpath. “What really upset me about the video was the fact that he put me in harm’s way,” he groused. “You know, he seems to have forgotten that the CEO of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York. And to put any citizen in harm’s way is just inappropriate for one of our political leaders.” As retribution, Griffin announced that his hedge fund, Citadel, would be expanding its Miami office, adding more jobs there that would have, in theory, gone to New York City. The $6 billion supertall office tower Griffin has been planning to build on Park Avenue as Citadel’s new global headquarters is now in some degree of doubt.

Would Mamdani have been better off not referencing Griffin at all in his video? Probably. Griffin is a notoriously fickle Wall Street oligarch who already ripped his firm, Citadel, out of Chicago citing political differences with that city’s left-wing mayor. The departure was expensive for Chicago and Illinois, costing them a major corporate taxpayer and around........

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