Progressives’ Performative Billionaire-Bashing Hurts the Cities They Govern

K en Griffin, hedge fund manager and CEO of Citadel, is donating $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, most of which is intended to build a new school in Miami, Fla., focused on innovation and technology. The new campus is expected to have more than 3,500 students and 300 faculty members. It will accept its first students in 2028.

Richard Vedder, a professor emeritus at Ohio University and the author of Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America, told me that Griffin’s gift might be the harbinger of a trend: prestigious universities going national via satellite campuses. Vanderbilt is moving in that direction, as is Northeastern University. “This would accelerate a trend toward schools in the South and West,” he says. “For years, we’ve been seeing red-state enrollments in colleges rising faster than blue-state ones.”

What is a big boon for Miami’s burgeoning tech sector is an epic tragedy for Chicago, where Griffin — and Citadel — was based for 33 years before he decided he had had enough of Illinois’s punishing taxes, regulation, and crime, and moved to Miami in 2022. A Chicago Tribune editorial lays out the stark message that Griffin’s gift sends to the Windy City: Chicago’s horrible governance continues to chase away the city’s most successful people. A Chicago expert in corporate giving told me that Griffin had given over $600 million to Chicago institutions over the years, including $125 million to what is now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park. “When they leave, their charitable dollars leave,” he said, in reference to donors such as Griffin. Even billionaire Bruce Rauner, who served as governor of Illinois from 2015 to 2019, abandoned the state for Florida after losing his 2018 reelection bid.

Regarding Griffin’s departure, the Tribune pointed out just “how counter-productive it was for Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to feud with Griffin.” On Tax Day this year, April 15, Mamdani infamously promoted his new tax on mansions owned by non–New York City residents by filming a video outside Griffin’s $238 million pied-à-terre. Griffin claimed that the mayor’s move had put him in danger. Progressive leaders’ performative billionaire-bashing (Mamdani has said he doesn’t believe any billionaires should exist) has only hurt the cities that they govern. The Tribune notes that, by alienating Griffin, progressives “helped create a very powerful competitor entirely capable of remaking Miami into a dense and livable urban core,” which might result in “urban re-ordering on a scale America has never seen.” This internal migration trend is clearly “eroding the decades-old competitive advantage of New York and Chicago.”

The Tribune’s downbeat editorial ends with the hope that this slow-motion suicide will “finally inspire a long-overdue turn toward competent and limited government in Illinois and New York.” The editors then admitted that it was one bet they wouldn’t make.

Note: Ken Griffin is a supporter of National Review Institute.