ISTANBUL
Newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who made history Tuesday as the first Muslim and South Asian to win the office, got support on his way to victory from two billionaires, according to a report from Forbes magazine.
The report found that, while at least 26 billionaires poured more than $22 million into efforts to block Mamdani’s rise, two wealthy figures — Elizabeth Simons and Tom Preston-Werner — donated to groups supporting him.
Simons, the daughter of the late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons, contributed $250,000 in August to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, the main independent group backing Mamdani’s campaign. A longtime Democratic donor and philanthropist, she heads the Heising-Simons Foundation, which has granted more than $1.3 billion to causes related to climate change, education, and human rights.
Preston-Werner, co-founder of the GitHub coding platform and a California-based venture capitalist, donated $20,000 to the same group in April. His foundation has distributed about $28 million since 2019, according to tax filings cited by Forbes.
Together, their contributions made up roughly 10% of the money raised by New Yorkers for Lower Costs, setting them apart from an array of billionaire donors — including Michael Bloomberg and Reed Hastings — who funded Mamdani’s rivals.
Despite the influx of outside spending against him, Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and state assemblyman, defeated independent candidate and former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa in Tuesday’s three-way race.
With 91% of votes counted, Mamdani led with more than 50% support, according to results from the Associated Press.
“We will usher in a generation of change,” Mamdani told supporters at a victory rally in Brooklyn. “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.”
Forbes noted that Mamdani’s campaign, bolstered by New York’s public-matching system, drew over 40,000 individual donors with an average contribution of $98, the smallest among major candidates. Cuomo’s campaign, by contrast, had about 10,000 donors with an average of $593.
Though many rich Americans support the Republican Party, many others – such as billionaire investor Warren Buffet and Depression-era President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who came from a wealthy family – support progressive policies such as higher taxes on the rich, believing such measures promote the common good.