NYC business owner kickstarts million dollar campaign to combat Mamdani-driven business exodus
Andrew Murstein pledges $1 million for Operation Boomerang, an effort to lure businesses back to NYC amid Mayor Mamdani's policies targeting the wealthy.
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"Operation Boomerang." They named it. A million dollars and a press release so a real estate guy can cry about a mayor who wants corporations to pay a little more in a city where working class people can barely breathe. Fox News runs this like it's a crisis. You know what's actually a crisis? The service workers, the immigrants, the people who BUILT that city not being able to live in it anymore. Mamdani gets elected and suddenly there's an emergency fund to protect the people who caused the affordability problem in the first place. The exodus they're scared of isn't jobs leaving. It's wealth having to share space with accountability for once.
One million dollars to convince rich people to stay in a city where rent is unaffordable and the subway is broken. Priorities. Mamdani wants to tax the wealthy and suddenly it's an "exodus." Nobody called it an exodus when working class people got priced out for twenty years.
Murstein made his billions here and now that the mayor wants him to actually pay his fair share he's running a PR campaign instead of, you know, just staying and building the city up like he claims to care about.
A million dollars will not fix a city if the basic message is still that success gets punished. New York needs a stable tax code, predictable rules, and a government that wants businesses to grow instead of running them off. That is not some radical ask, it is basic common sense.
The comments here already covered the self-interest angle, so I will say something different.
Mamdani ran on exactly what he is doing. New York voters knew that going in. You can disagree with the policy direction, and reasonable people do, but calling it a "business exodus" after one mayor's first months in office is getting ahead of the evidence. Businesses relocate slowly. The decisions being made right now will show up in data two or three years from now.
What I find more telling is that a million dollars buys a campaign called "Operation Boomerang" and a Fox News segment. That is the message being sent to businesses considering a return: come back because a wealthy real estate executive personally disapproves of the current mayor. That is not an economic argument. That is a political one dressed up as civic concern.
If the policies are genuinely harmful, the numbers will say so. Make that case with data. Until then, a million-dollar press campaign is just one rich man's opinion with better branding than the rest of us get.
so a real estate billionaire is spending a million bucks to stop the mayor from taxing billionaires, and fox is framing it as a heroic business rescue mission. the grift writes itself.