After Zohran Mamdani clinched the New York Metropolis mayoral race on Tuesday evening, his marketing campaign introduced former FTC chair Lina Khan as one of many transition workforce’s 4 co-chairs.
Khan has been an ally of Mamdani’s, praising him in a New York Instances op-ed about his outreach to small enterprise homeowners. However her appointment to a proper function on his transition workforce sends a message to Wall Road and the tech trade, whose strongest gamers have already been crucial of Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who ruffled the feathers of the tech elite by criticizing billionaires and proposing a 2% tax of incomes over $1 million.
“What we noticed final evening was New Yorkers not simply electing a brand new mayor, however clearly rejecting a politics the place outsized company energy and cash too usually find yourself dictating our politics,” Khan mentioned in a speech on Wednesday.
Khan described Mamdani’s victory as “a transparent mandate for change the place New Yorkers can get forward, and the place all staff and small companies can thrive — not simply get by.”
Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, in addition to traders like Invoice Ackman and Mike Bloomberg, every spent hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to oppose Mamdani and advocate for former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who completed second within the polls. DoorDash additionally gave $1 million to a pro-Cuomo tremendous PAC. Mamdani’s platform, nonetheless, advocated for elevated regulation of supply apps and protections for his or her subcontracted gig staff.
Like Mamdani, Khan has enemies in excessive locations. As an outspoken critic of tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, Khan moved to dam numerous high-profile tech mergers throughout her tenure within the Biden administration. When these actions failed, many in Silicon Valley nonetheless held Khan chargeable for slowing down the movement of acquisition offers.
Even those that supported the Biden-Harris presidential ticket, like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, have been public about their criticisms of Khan; in an interview with TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos final 12 months, Khosla described Khan as “not a rational human being.”
Khan, a professor at Columbia Legislation College, is described as “the nation’s main antimonopoly champion” on Mamdani’s transition web site.
Along with Khan, the opposite three co-chairs embody Grace Bonilla, president and CEO of the non-profit United Manner of New York Metropolis; Maria Torres-Springer, the previous first deputy mayor of New York Metropolis; and Melanie Hartzog, president and CEO of the non-profit New York Foundling.
The 4 might be led by Elana Leopold, an advisor to Mamdani’s marketing campaign who held numerous senior roles throughout the de Blasio mayoral administration.
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