Zohran Mamdani’s election has billionaires searching for answers. One of them thinks he’s found an answer—from another billionaire. The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s definitive victory in Tuesday’s New York City mayoral election brings an odd fact reality to life. As JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon mused onstage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women summit in late October, “it is odd to have the bastion of American capitalism with a socialist” coming to the mayor’s office. Still, Dimon has been open to engaging with Mamdani, unlike many of America’s wealthiest business leaders, who put an estimated $22 million behind the effort to defeat the upstart from Queens and are now grappling with the fallout.
To be sure, some of New York’s elite in finance and tech are now offering their congratulations to Mamdami after having poured millions into keeping him away from the mayor’s office. One vocal critic, activist investor Bill Ackman congratulated the mayor-elect Tuesday after having reportedly donated $1.75 million to oppose him. It’s an open question just how leftist Mamdani will be as he governs, but Dimon noted in conversation with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that “he was part of that socialist democratic thing, which literally is more Marxist than socialist—and I read it—but I don’t know what he believes in that.”
