- 6/25/2025
Despite his own privileged path to power, or perhaps because of it, Zohran Mamdani, the son of a Columbia University professor and a movie director is campaigning as a socialist intent on redistributing New York’s wealth. Forbes money in politics reporter Kyle Khan-Mullins joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss.
Read the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2025/06/24/heres-how-much-new-york-city-mayoral-candidate-zohran-mamdani-is-worth/
Read the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2025/06/24/heres-how-much-new-york-city-mayoral-candidate-zohran-mamdani-is-worth/
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00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now
00:07is my Forbes colleague, money and politics reporter Kyle Conn-Mullins. Kyle, thanks so
00:11much for joining me. Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks for having me.
00:15We are talking about a local race today, a local primary that has made national news.
00:21I want to talk about the Democratic New York City mayoral primary. That happened last night. I want
00:26to talk about some numbers that came out in February because it paints a very stark difference
00:32from what we saw on Tuesday night. In February, this was the first poll on the race from Emerson
00:38College. Polling picks 11 and the Hill on the mayoral primary. Governor Cuomo was polling at 33%.
00:44This was what was described as his race to lose. But New York State Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani was
00:51polling at 1%. Now he won. Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded last night. I think a lot of questions
00:58that the nation is asking right now is, who exactly is Zoran Mamdani? You have some answers
01:04for us. So to start off the conversation, talk to us a little bit about his background.
01:10Absolutely. Zoran Mamdani, this Assemblyman from Queens, representing the Astoria neighborhood
01:15in Queens. He has been on his third term in the New York State Assembly, passed a couple
01:23of bills, conducted funny votes. But that is his political resume right there, is five
01:30years in the New York State Assembly. He ran a really kind of an outsidery, insurgent, media
01:35savvy campaign against Andrew Cuomo. Obviously, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York,
01:40resigned in disgrace after sexual misconduct allegations back in 2021. This was his attempt
01:45on a political comeback, and it didn't work out for him. I do think a lot of political
01:50analysts were saying that this was Cuomo's race to lose, and Mamdani ushered him into that
01:56and managed to beat Cuomo. It's a pretty remarkable political story. We're going to talk more about
02:02Mamdani, but yeah, that's the basic story here. And he's 33 years old, and this seems to be a
02:10double-edged sword for him, because critics are saying he's essentially too young, he's lacking
02:15experience. Supporters are saying Democrats need a fresh face, a fresh perspective, a younger
02:21generation. So you rattled off his political resume. He doesn't have much in the politics
02:28space. Talk to us about his background before politics. What was he doing then?
02:34Absolutely. So Zohar Mamdani, son of immigrants to New York City, he moved to New York City when he
02:39was seven. His parents, both Indian Americans, who, when they originally moved to New York City,
02:46it was because his father, a professor at Columbia, had just gotten a job teaching at Columbia University.
02:51He's a pretty prominent post-colonial scholar, studies colonialism in Africa, conflicts in Africa,
02:57that kind of thing. His mother is a pretty well-known movie director. She's made a bunch of different
03:06movies about, you know, focus, among other things, on the South Asian diaspora around the world.
03:12His parents actually met in Uganda, and that's where, while she was on set for a, doing research
03:19for a movie, that's where Mamdani was born originally. And then, like I said, they moved to
03:24New York when he was seven years old. They've lived there ever since. He went to a private school in
03:28New York for most of his schooling, and then graduated from the Bronx School of Science. That's in the public
03:33school system in New York City. It's one of the best schools in the city. After that, he went to
03:37Bowdoin College up in Maine, majored in Africana Studies, and then he kind of bounced around for a
03:42little while. He had a temporary career as a rapper. He did some community organizing. He worked on a
03:47couple political campaigns. So his work in the Assembly is not the only political experience he has.
03:52He would say that his organizing, a valuable form of political experience there. One of his jobs was
03:59counseling people who were getting evicted from their homes foreclosed or hiding their homes foreclosed
04:03on, and he was helping them through that process. So lots of different, you know, careers there. He's
04:09also a tutor at one point. He became a citizen in 2018, a naturalized citizen of the United States,
04:14and then ran for office and won in 2020. He beat an incumbent to win a seat in the state legislature,
04:21and that's where he's at now.
04:22And this race was really described by political analysts, especially this morning after the results
04:29came in, as kind of a fight for the identity of the Democratic Party and a case study of where the
04:37Democratic Party goes next. Because Mamdani, he's a lot more progressive than Governor Andrew Cuomo.
04:44The former governor is viewed as the more moderate, more centrist candidate here. Mamdani is a self-described
04:50Democratic socialist. He ran a campaign promising to combat the affordability crisis in the Big Apple.
04:56And after Cuomo conceded Tuesday night, I want to read what Mamdani said. He credited his victory in
05:01part to a campaign that had a, quote, vision of a city every New Yorker can afford. And this is from
05:07your reporting. Despite his own privileged path to power, or perhaps because of it, the son of a
05:12Columbia University professor and a movie director is campaigning as a socialist, intent on redistributing
05:18New York's wealth. Give us the highlight reel here. What exactly was he campaigning on?
05:25Absolutely. His biggest proposal, his headline proposal, the one that I think showed up in the
05:29most of his campaign ads, was freezing the rent. The mayor of New York and the city of New York
05:34have control over the rent in a lot of rent control departments all over New York City.
05:38Those, they've allowed that rent to enter Eric Adams, the current mayor. They've allowed that rent to go
05:45up as, you know, both as inflation has occurred, but also as, you know, landlords need to do maintenance,
05:52that kind of thing. That's the general idea of why you would increase the rent. Mamdani has said that
05:56the landlords who own these rent control departments are making too much profit on them. He points to
06:01some statistics that show that profit on some of these units went up by 12 percent last year,
06:06for example. And so he says he's going to freeze the rent. He's not going to allow landlords to
06:10raise rent on those rent controlled tenants while he is in office. So that's one really big proposal
06:15that he has come out and said he's going to do. But he also had a whole plethora of other proposals,
06:19again, focused on that cost of living in New York issue. He has talked about building more housing.
06:26That's another piece of, you know, expanding the housing supply. He's talked about opening a network
06:31of city owned grocery stores that he thinks might be able to offer groceries at lower costs than
06:36for profit grocery stores. He's talked about making the bus system in New York free to use
06:43and so so that people don't have to pay to use the bus. So you got all these ideas. And again,
06:49laser focused, it really seemed to me on I'm trying to address cost of living issues. There are a lot of
06:56folks who say that, you know, his approach wasn't going to work necessarily that, you know, there
07:01are examples of some of these policies working in some places and not working in others. That's
07:06certainly the critique that Cuomo levied at him and also some of his other rivals in the Democratic
07:11primary. But he managed to convince the people in New York. And affordability is really a top concern
07:17facing plenty of New Yorkers. There's a joke that if you walk outside your apartment door in New York,
07:22that'll cost you 20 bucks. And he really put himself and positioned himself as a champion
07:28for the working class of New York City. You dug into his finances a bit based on your reporting.
07:33I mean, what exactly did you find? Yeah, his finances aren't particularly complicated.
07:40He only owns according to his disclosures that he said to file both as a state assemblyman and then also
07:44as a mayoral candidate. He only has one major asset. And that is some land that he owns in Uganda.
07:51That's his country of birth, you might remember. It's worth between $150,000 to $250,000. So we're
07:57estimating that he's worth probably around $200,000 if that is his only major asset. Now,
08:01these disclosures do have some caveats in them. You've got the fact that they don't have to report
08:07cash accounts. So if he has a lot of money in cash accounts, that might be a different situation.
08:11Also, there are certain debts you don't have to disclose either. So if he has any student debt,
08:14that might not show up as well. Yeah, there's a couple of caveats. But generally,
08:20we're showing that he's not worth an enormous amount of money. He doesn't own any property in
08:24the city. He doesn't own a car. As he has made very clear, he takes the public transit to all of
08:29his debate appearances and that kind of thing. So yeah, that's the general story of his finances.
08:35They're not particularly complicated. He makes a salary and as an assemblyman of $142,000 a year,
08:40that's pretty good, frankly, for someone living in New York. And that about sums it up.
08:48I mean, not particularly complicated. I mean, that's good for you and your reporting pretty
08:52cut and dry when you look at it. You mentioned earlier that he does come from more affluent
08:57beginnings. What does his parents' fortunes look like? Yeah, we don't have as many details on his
09:03parents' fortune because they aren't politicians who have to file financial disclosures. But what we do
09:08know is his father is a professor at Columbia. They tend to make pretty good money. We'd probably
09:12estimate between $200,000 and $300,000 based on data from the American Association of University
09:18Professors. And his mom is an award director of multiple movies. We assume that she's made quite
09:26a bit of money over the math. They live in Columbia-owned apartments on the Upper West Side.
09:35Their apartment was last listed for about $6,000 in rent in 2017. I'm sure that would be higher now.
09:40I don't know exactly. We don't know exactly what they're paying, but they do appear to be renters,
09:44so they don't own property either. His mom did used to own a condo down in Chelsea, but sold it in
09:4920, I think it was 2018, if I remember correctly. So we don't have a ton of visibility, but we know that
09:54they are a reasonably well-off, college-educated couple living in New York.
10:00And you and I have talked before when we talk about politicians' net worths,
10:04that the spouse can contribute to their fortune. And one outlet joked yesterday,
10:09they said that should Mamdani win in November, he could be the very first mayor in New York to meet
10:16his spouse on Hinge. So he recently got married. Do we know anything about his wife's net worth,
10:23how much she makes? What do you know about the finances there?
10:27Yeah, something tells me Andrew Cuomo isn't on Hinge. Not married, but probably not on Hinge,
10:32looking for a new partner. As for Mamdani's wife, we don't know a ton about her either.
10:36They only got married this year, so she actually doesn't appear on disclosures because they
10:41tend to be filed for the previous year. She's an artist for Syria, now is in the United States,
10:47and that's most of what we know. We'll see probably next year. Assuming that he wins the mayoralship,
10:54he'll have to file additional financial disclosures. And when he does that, we'll probably
10:59get a better sense of whether she has any assets that she's bringing to the marriage.
11:04And really up until the day before the election, former governor Andrew Cuomo was the front runner.
11:10I mean, he's a household name not only in New York, New York State, New York City, but the entire
11:15country because of his daily COVID briefings five years ago. How does Mamdani's net worth stack up to
11:23the former governors? First thing we should note here is Zora Mamdani is 33 years old and Andrew Cuomo is
11:2967. So he's had a lot longer of a life to build a fortune and he's absolutely done that. We estimate
11:34that Andrew Cuomo was worth about $10 million. And it could be higher. There's some limits on
11:39these disclosures. So we actually aren't 100% sure on that. We estimate about $10 million is a good bet.
11:45And he's made plenty of money over the years. He signed some pretty lucrative book deals back in
11:50the day. After he resigned from office, he went into legal consulting and ended up making plenty of
11:56money there. His biggest single asset we think is probably his stock options and nuclear company that
12:02he serves on the advisory board of. That's probably about $4 million of his fortune sitting there in
12:07that. So overall, I would say Cuomo is worth significantly more. We calculate about 50 times
12:13more estimated roughly than Mamdani. That really does provide a bit of a contrast between the two
12:21candidates who are both trying to sell themselves as the candidate of the working class.
12:25Former Governor Cuomo said in May he was going to run as an independent,
12:29regardless if he won the Democratic primary or not. That does remain to be seen, though,
12:34because if he continues on to the general election, which he said before he was going to,
12:39now he's saying, hey, I'm going to check out the ranked choice voting results and then decide my path
12:45forward after that. But if he does decide to run, I'm sure you and I will have another conversation
12:50where we do dive into his finances a bit more. But I'm curious, now let's look back to Mamdani.
12:56Let's say he does win the general election in November. How will his finances change should he
13:02unseat Mayor Eric Adams? Well, the first thing the note to raise from his roughly $140,000
13:09salary as a New York Assemblyman to a $260,000 salary as a New York mayor, that's a pretty good
13:15public salary right there. I think it might be more than the Vice President of the United States makes,
13:19actually, if I'm off the top of my head. Additionally, he's going to save money on
13:24rent. He's going to get to move into Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence,
13:28to be renting in Astoria anymore. And he doesn't own a car. That's going to be okay,
13:36because Gracie Mansion is just a couple of blocks from the Q train. He'll be able to take the subway to
13:39work, just like he's been doing this whole time. So his finances today, pretty solid,
13:44if he becomes the mayor of New York. Kyle, per usual, always appreciate your reporting.
13:51Thanks for joining me. Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks again.
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