Jeff Bezos on Zohran Mamdani’s big mistake: ‘When you don’t know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them’

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.”

Mamdani’s April 14 video—posted to social media on Tax Day and filmed outside Griffin’s Central Park South penthouse—was a deliberate provocation. It announced New York’s first-ever pied-à-terre tax proposal, backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, which would levy an annual surcharge on non-primary residences valued at $5 million or more. The proposal is projected to generate roughly $500 million a year to help close the city’s budget gap.

Griffin didn’t take the video quietly. The Citadel CEO called it “creepy” and “frightening” and threatened to cancel a planned $6 billion Midtown development project, saying he would redirect investment to Miami instead—a threat that drew Gov. Hochul into mediation. Mamdani’s office fired back that “our tax system is fundamentally broken,” nevertheless the mayor reportedly went on a listening, maybe even apology tour, with financial leaders.

Bezos largely stayed above that particular fray, but did redirect the underlying fiscal argument. He suggested government spending—not a lack of taxes on the wealthy—is the core problem. “Any corporate CEO, CFO worth their salt—an Amazon CFO could find 3% in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon,” he said. “There is so much waste in government spending.”

The entire affair represents a serious threat to Mamdani’s ambitious far-left agenda. For Bezos, the fourth-richest man in the world, to be redirecting the conversation back toward policy dysfunction and government waste and away from Mamdani’s plans to hike taxes on the billionaire class, shows what a fight those ambitions will be to realize.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.