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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) took a thinly veiled jab at Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk on Friday during a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence, saying the trillionaire’s immense wealth epitomizes the “contradictions” that exist in the country.
“As we mark 250 years, what do we see?” Mamdani asked as he reflected on the nation’s founding from behind the wooden desk once used by former President George Washington, now housed in City Hall in Lower Manhattan. “We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions.
“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” he continued.
Musk cemented his status as by far the world’s richest man when his company SpaceX went public last month, surpassing the $1 trillion mark for the first time in history. His net worth currently stands at an estimated $997.1 billion, according to Forbes.
For comparison, the United Nations projects that ending world hunger by 2030 would cost roughly $93 billion a year. That is about three times as much as Feeding America’s estimated annual budget shortfall for individuals facing hunger in the U.S. alone.
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, frequently points to wealth inequality as a symptom of broader systemic policy failures and has pushed for higher taxes on the ultrawealthy as a way to fix the city’s budget deficit.
He famously said during the 2024 mayoral campaign that he doesn’t believe billionaires should exist, arguing that such a concentration of wealth was unjustifiable “in a moment of such inequality.”
The mayor also appeared to make a not-so-subtle swipe at the hundreds of millions of dollars Musk spent during the last presidential cycle to help put President Trump back in the White House.
“We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections,” Mamdani remarked, later suggesting that the U.S. is “sell[ing] our elections to the highest bidder.”
Musk publicly backed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) independent bid for New York City mayor a day before the 2025 general election, urging followers on his social platform X to reject Mamdani.
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