In the weeks since Zohran Mamdani’s New York City Democratic primary win on June 20, a slew of tech executives who do not have a primary residence in the city or state of New York have been panicking about the prospect of him becoming mayor.
Every member of the popular All-In podcast, including current White House “AI and crypto czar” David Sacks, has raised alarms on X about the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty.
“Wake up, Silicon Valley,” Sacks posted on June 29, sharing a video of Mamdani on Meet the Press. “You basically have two choices now: Get on board with MAGA or prepare to be on Mamdani’s dinner menu.”
Gemini cofounders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan have also posted about Mamdani with some combination of anger, fear, and dread since his primary win. Even Elon Musk has weighed in, though with less frequency and intensity than his posts on many other topics.
Generally speaking, these tech leaders' slights are mostly concerned with Mamdani identifying as a Democratic Socialist—though, they often describe him as a plain “socialist,” which is meaningfully different, or a “communist,” which is completely different.
But some tech leaders who live or have corporate headquarters in New York City tell WIRED that they don’t agree. Several executives who attended an approximately 200-person private meeting on July 16 with Mamdani tell WIRED that they were impressed by Mamdani’s eagerness to listen to their concerns, his thoughtful answers to their questions, and his charisma, which eased the tension in a room with a diverse set of opinions.
One attendee, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, tells WIRED that the makeup of the people at the tech-focused event, cohosted by Partnership for New York City (PNYC), appeared to be primarily company founders, general partners, and senior executives. Among them, they claim, were William Floyd, Google’s senior director of US state and local government affairs and public policy; Nihal Mehta, cofounder of Eniac Venture Capital; and Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC.
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Event moderator Kevin Ryan, the chief executive officer of venture capital firm AlleyCorp and founding member of the professional network Tech:NYC, tells WIRED that coming out of the meeting, attendees seemingly “felt better about Zohran than they did coming in,” noting that Mamdani “is charming, well-spoken, articulate, and comes across as genuine.”
“I'm not saying that everyone walked out wanting to vote for him,” says Ryan (who also helped to organize events for several other candidates). “But what I've heard afterwards from people is that they were at least impressed.”
Ryan adds that people were often “frustrated at either the vagueness of some of his answers,” or have the perception of Mamdani as not very “pro-business.”
John Borthwick, CEO of the venture capital firm Betaworks, tells WIRED that he is skeptical about the feasibility and potential effectiveness of many Mamdani campaign proposals—like free buses, or a city-owned grocery store pilot program—and felt his answers tended to be “very general and nonspecific.” But Borthwick adds that he found Mamdani “very compelling and friendly, and a smart, interesting person.”
“I think he's very good at campaigning, and it also illustrates a massive vacuum within the Democratic party that he is very adeptly filling,” Borthwick says. “It's a vacuum of lack of new ideas, lack of new people, lack of views. And I think that there's an idealism that he brings that is refreshing.”
A handful of questions focused on how a Mamdani mayoralty would affect the tech industry. Borthwick says he asked Mamdani how he would respond to the risk that artificial intelligence poses to jobs—in particular, entry-level white-collar jobs—over the next several years.
“I'm kind of amazed that this has not become already a campaign issue,” Borthwick says. He says that Mamdani “admitted that this hasn't been a focus of the campaign, but would need to be a focus if he was elected.” But overall, Borthwick didn’t feel Mamdani’s answer was specific enough.
Ryan says that he asked Mamdani about the “staggering increase” in the number of tech workers and startups based in New York City in recent years. He says Mamdani “acknowledged” the prominence of New York’s tech sector and talked about how the public sphere could learn from it. Ryan says Mamdani floated a few ideas, like having the city government use AI to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and introducing a progress-meter for 311 complaints resembling something like the Domino’s pizza tracker.
Most of the conversation with Mamdani, however, focused on things that mattered to attendees as New Yorkers rather than businesspeople. Susan Lyne, cofounder and managing partner of BBG Ventures, tells WIRED that she thinks attendees “were there to understand who this guy is, who might be our next mayor.”
“The tech industry actually doesn't need any tax breaks,” Ryan tells WIRED. “What we do need is a city where all kinds of super smart people who are between the age of 20 and 40 want to come work.”
In the first years after the pandemic, New York City attracted more relocating tech workers than any city in the country, despite having some of the nation’s highest rent rates.
Mamdani was also asked about universal child care up to 5 years old, which he supports, and what his priority would be during his first 100 days in office, which he said would be free buses. He was also asked about his stance on charter schools.
What went unremarked upon during this meeting, however, is the online discourse railing against Mamdani, which one person who attended the meeting said has had “a lot of influence” in the tech world.
Much of the online discourse about Mamdani doesn’t focus on specific policies. Frequently mentioned, however, are Mamdani’s public comments about how billionaires would not exist in a just society in which workers are paid fairly and moderating forces on wealth inequality exist. Individuals like Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan have responded by wearing shirts that say “We should have more billionaires” in the color scheme and style of Mamdani’s campaign material. (Tan, however, has specifically spoken out against Mamdani’s critical position on specialized high schools several times, calling the position “anti-Asian.”)
Joe Lonsdale has called Mamdani a “radical anti-white communist,” while Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has referred to Mamdani as an “Islamist,” which Mamdani has never identified as. For Maguire, a staunch defender of Israel and its actions in Gaza, another contributing factor seems to be Mamdani’s vocal criticism of the Israeli government and support for Palestinian rights. Maguire has repeatedly made unfounded and outlandish claims about Mamdani in recent months, claiming that Mamdani has "manipulated" voters and has "mutated to be more palatable for the Western mind," with the ultimate goal of "dismantling Israel." Maguire's invective also includes a nearly 30-minute video uploaded to his account that attempted to tie Mamdani to an "insidious Islamist agenda." The Center for American-Islamic Relations has described Maguire's rhetoric as a “dangerous pattern of anti-Muslim hate speech.”
One meeting attendee—who identifies as Jewish and requested anonymity in order to speak freely—tells WIRED that discourse about Mamdani is active among Jewish tech workers and venture capitalists, who they say often differ in their opinions about the state of Israel and the violence being waged in Gaza.
Several attendees of the July 16 meeting tell WIRED that one person confronted Mamdani about his stance on Israel and the slogan “globalize the intifada.” (Directly translated from Arabic, “intifada” means “shaking off” or “uprising,” but the word is also associated with the First and Second Intifadas in Palestine. Mamdani has previously said that he does not say “globalize the intifada” and would discourage others from doing so, because the phrase lacks clarity and is heard by some as a call for violence against Jews.)
Another attendee who requested anonymity says they believe he was “thoughtful” in his response, which included assurance that he would not use the slogan. “He did not back away from his belief that Palestinian rights are really important,” they tell WIRED. “And I respected that, to be honest.”
The attendee added that things like nuance and respect can get lost when conversations happen online as opposed to in-person.
“I think that anytime you have someone who has a campaign that does not sit in the middle of the road, you get a ton of chatter,” they claim. “And I think the problem is that everything gets played out as essentially slogans, not as real issues.”
A spokesperson for Mamdani’s campaign acknowledged WIRED’s request for comment but declined to provide an on-record statement.
Update: 8/29/2025, 11:00 AM EDT: WIRED has clarified the name of BBG Ventures.
