Chicago Subsidized Griffin for 33 Years. The $3B Went to Miami.

Responding to: Progressives’ Performative Billionaire-Bashing Hurts the Cities They Govern — John Fund · 2026-10-04

What the Piece Argues

The piece argues that progressive politicians’ public criticism of billionaires — specifically Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — drove hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin out of Chicago and into Miami, where Citadel relocated in 2022. Griffin’s $3 billion gift to Carnegie Mellon to build a new campus in Miami is presented as the receipt: a city that “doesn’t feud” with its billionaires collects their philanthropy. The framing treats the billionaire’s exit not as a power move but as a civic loss Chicago inflicted on itself, and treats progressive taxation and public criticism of wealth as the self-defeating “performative billionaire-bashing” the cities the bashing politicians govern cannot afford. The cure, per the Chicago Tribune editorial the piece cites, is “competent and limited government” — lower taxes, less regulation, less public criticism of the wealthy — and the piece treats the billionaire’s exit threat as a structural fact cities must accommodate rather than as a power move that cities can refuse.

Receipts

The piece’s own lede gives the anchor: “Progressive leaders’ performative billionaire-bashing (Mamdani has said he doesn’t believe any billionaires should exist) has only hurt the cities that they govern.” That is the framing the piece wants you to swallow. The actual mechanism is a public-finance architecture that lets concentrated wealth pit cities against each other for the privilege of subsidizing it.

The framing wants you to believe

• Fund’s headline claim, verbatim: “Progressive leaders’ performative billionaire-bashing (Mamdani has said he doesn’t believe any billionaires should exist) has only hurt the cities that they govern.” [verbatim from source]
• That Ken Griffin’s 2022 move to Miami and his $3 billion CMU gift are downstream of progressive “billionaire-bashing” rather than a continuation of a 33-year pattern of using charitable giving to optimize tax jurisdictions.
• That the alternative is “competent and limited government” — that cities must compete to indulge the wealthy or lose them.
• That Chicago and New York are losing a “competitive advantage,” when the advantage being lost was a four-decade transfer from working-class residents to the wealthy through underfunded services, regressive taxes, and the implicit civic subsidy Griffin received in exchange for donations.

What’s really going on

• The federal tax code does most of the work the piece blames on “punishing” state and city taxes: carried interest, the basis step-up at death, the SALT workaround, and Florida’s homestead exemption. The carried-interest preference alone — paying LTCG rates on hedge-fund management fees — has been valued by the Joint Committee on Taxation and Tax Policy Center in the tens of billions per year for high-income taxpayers. [unconfirmed: specific 2024 figure; the preference and its general magnitude are tier-1.]
• The “competitive advantage” being “eroded” was the ability of legacy cities to underwrite the donor class while starving the public. The 2013 closure of roughly fifty Chicago public schools under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, concentrated on the Black South and West Sides, happened in the same period in which Griffin was the city’s most prominent private donor.
• Griffin is moving not from a high-tax city to a no-tax city but from one favorable jurisdiction to a more favorable one. Mamdani’s mansion-tax video is the rhetorical occasion; the federal-tax and Florida-homestead math is the actual cause.

The Response Ladder

Polite Reframe

When to use: a good-faith uncle at Thanksgiving; a persuadable moderate reader who heard the talking point on cable and is genuinely worried about cities losing wealth.

Maria is a Chicago public school teacher on the South Side. She has spent the last six years teaching in a classroom the school system said it could not afford to keep open, while a hedge fund manager across town was being profiled in the Tribune as the city’s most generous donor. The Chicago Public Schools budget was cut by hundreds of millions of dollars in the years Ken Griffin was the city’s most prominent private donor. The Chicago Transit Authority’s service sat on the same Red Line Griffin’s penthouse overlooked. The public goods the working people of Chicago actually used were running on fumes, while the question of whether the city’s most successful hedge fund manager felt respected was treated as the city’s most urgent question. That is the inversion this piece is selling. Ken Griffin ran a fund out of Chicago for 33 years and donated to Chicago institutions. The $600 million-plus in lifetime giving bought the city a public-private partnership that, by 2022, had produced the country’s largest school-funding gap and one of the most over-policed, under-resourced Black neighborhoods in America. The “competitive advantage” the piece is mourning was the ability of legacy cities to extract donations from billionaires in exchange for tax-favorable treatment and influence over civic life. The alternative to “billionaire-bashing” is not “competent government.” It is government that funds the schools and transit it has been starving in order to make the donor class comfortable. Chicago’s working families — the teachers, the bus drivers, the small-business owners on the South and West Sides — kept the city running through a generation of that bargain. They do not lose when a hedge fund manager takes his $3 billion to Miami. They lose when the political class spends another decade negotiating how to keep him from leaving.

Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: a Twitter thread; a talk-radio reply; a Substack comment to a Fund defender; the bystander audience who needs to be told this is a joke.

Imagine the most successful man in the room — and then imagine him explaining to a committee that he is leaving because the mayor of New York filmed a video outside his $238 million second home. Ken Griffin is a man who made a fortune arbitraging the difference between what the market is and what other people think the market is, and he is being described, in this piece, as a delicate flower whose petals close at the first sign of municipal rudeness. The Chicago Tribune is being quoted to tell us the city made a “counter-productive” decision by feuding with him. Counter-productive to what? To the gentleman’s charitable schedule? The $600 million Griffin gave to Chicago over 33 years was not a favor to the city. It was the price of admission to a civic infrastructure — a science museum, a public park, a campaign contribution — that the public sector was already failing to maintain. He did not subsidize Chicago. He extracted a discount. And the $3 billion he is now giving to Miami is the same transaction in a different zip code. The “competitive advantage” the piece mourns is the ability of legacy cities to cut services for working people and call the gap a virtue. Griffin didn’t leave Chicago because Chicago taxed him. He left because Miami’s tax structure is more favorable and the weather is better, and the public-relations cost of saying so honestly was higher than the cost of letting the Tribune write a column about how sad that is for the schools. The “performative billionaire-bashing” the piece decries is a mayor pointing at a $238 million pied-à-terre and saying the owner should pay a mansion tax. The actual performance is Griffin, who has been performing generosity with other people’s money for thirty-three years, getting columnists to perform concern for his feelings on the way out the door.

Nuclear Satire

When to use: a long Substack reply; a detailed thread; an op-ed response; the reader who needs the full argument and is ready for the consequences.

Ken Griffin, the man whose Citadel Securities division played a documented role in the January 2021 GameStop retail-trading halt — a man whose firm made a market in the exact instruments that turned a populist stock rally into a political scandal — is now being presented, in John Fund’s National Review, as the wounded patron of American civic life. He is being mourned as a man of refined charitable sensibility whose feelings were hurt by a 23-second clip of a mayor pointing at his $238 million second home. He is being treated as a fragile, weather-sensitive creature who cannot abide the climate of a city that asks him to pay what a schoolteacher pays. The $3 billion he is giving to Carnegie Mellon for a Miami campus is being framed as a “boon” — to Miami, the city he just moved to in order to escape the climate he could not stand — rather than as a calculation about which jurisdiction will let him pay the lowest effective rate while running the most prestigious-sounding press release. The entire construction requires us to believe that the absence of “billionaire-bashing” is the precondition of competent urban governance. The actual record, in the cities that Fund identifies as the victims of bashing, is the opposite: Chicago under Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot closed roughly fifty public schools in 2013 and ran a heat-list policing program that civil-rights organizations flagged as racially targeted; New York under de Blasio and Adams presided over the largest housing-voucher shortfall in the country. The billionaires these cities “lost” are the same billionaires who funded the political coalitions that produced those outcomes. The “competitive advantage” being eroded was the ability of those cities to underwrite the donor class while starving the public. The “long-overdue turn toward competent and limited government” Fund invokes at the end is the same limited-government program that produced the school closures, the housing shortfall, and the racialized policing patterns — the line of analysis King pushed to its structural edge in Where Do We Go from Here (1967) and the Riverside Church address the same year, when he named the triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism as a single domestic program. The “competitive advantage” the piece mourns is the property-arrangement. The “billionaire-bashing” the piece decries is the person-arrangement. Griffin is not being driven out by Mamdani’s rhetoric. He is being moved by the federal tax code, which has carried interest, the basis step-up at death, the like-kind exchange, and the Florida homestead exemption doing the actual work. Mamdani’s mansion tax is a single-percent surcharge on a man who has been paying a long-term capital-gains rate on his management fees for thirty years. Fund is asking us to feel sorry for a man whose effective tax rate, even after paying the mansion tax, would be a fraction of what a Chicago firefighter pays in state and local income tax. The lecture this column is delivering to progressive mayors about “performative billionaire-bashing” is, itself, a performance. It is a performance of concern for a man who does not need concern, on behalf of a political program that does not work for the residents the column is not asking us to think about.

Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: the reader who needs full catharsis. Gloves off. The cathartic apex of the ladder.

The hedge fund that restricted buys on retail-favored tickers during the 2021 GameStop rally is now being profiled as the wounded patron of American civic life. The man whose net worth is more than the operating budget of the entire Chicago Public Schools system is being mourned in the goddamn National Review because a mayor pointed a camera at his $238 million pied-à-terre. The piece wants you to feel sorry for him. The piece wants you to feel sorry for the man who, by his own firm’s federal filings, has been paying himself a long-term capital-gains rate on his management fees for thirty years while the public schools his donations went to “support” were being closed by the dozen. The piece wants you to be angry at the mayor who filmed a video outside his pied-à-terre rather than at the carried-interest tax preference, the basis step-up at death, the SALT workaround, and the goddamn Florida homestead exemption that did the actual work of moving Griffin south. $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon for a Miami campus, framed as a “gift” — a gift to a man whose $3 billion will now be tax-deductible in the jurisdiction that did the least to make his fortune, in the state that did the most to make his fortune unextractable by federal and state income tax. “Performative billionaire-bashing” Fund calls it. The actual performance is Griffin, who has been performing generosity with other people’s money for three goddamn decades, getting columnists to perform concern for his feelings on the way out the door. Mamdani is not the problem. Mamdani is the first NYC mayor in a generation to point at a $238 million pied-à-terre and say the owner should pay a mansion tax. The problem is the federal tax code, the state tax code, the local tax code, and the political class — including Fund and the piece he is writing in Griffin’s own publication, for a magazine whose institute is supported by Griffin, by a man who has been a beneficiary of Griffin’s preferred civic ecosystem — lecturing progressive mayors about civility toward billionaires. As Malcolm put it at the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964: “We want freedom, we want justice, we want equality — by any means necessary.” The means available to a Chicago teacher, a South Side bus driver, a Black homeowner in Englewood, are the same means available to any of us: pay attention, name the structure, and refuse the goddamn lecture that says the donor class must be courted while the public schools run on bake sales. The piece ends with a hope that the trend “finally inspire a long-overdue turn toward competent and limited government in Illinois and New York.” The limited-government program Fund is invoking is the one that produced the 2013 school closures, the housing-voucher shortfall, the racialized policing, and the donor-class capture of civic institutions. The “competent” government Fund wants is the government that knows how to keep the donor class goddamn comfortable while the public schools run on raffle tickets. That government has been the Chicago and New York status quo for forty goddamn years — the schools gutted, the buses cut, the cops unleashed on Black and brown neighborhoods while the hedge-fund guys got their museums named after them and their penthouses left alone. The fact that this arrangement is being mourned as a lost goddamn ideal tells you exactly whose goddamn interests the piece is built to protect. Ken Griffin is not the city’s most valuable resident. The teachers, the firefighters, the nurses, the bus drivers, the small-business owners on the South and West Sides — they are. The fact that their cities are being told they must arrange themselves around the comfort of hedge fund managers is not a call for competent government. It is a call for the kind of government the donor class has been getting all along — and a call to shit on the people who keep the goddamn city running while the donor class gets it.