Jeff Bezos blasts Mamdani for casting billionaire Ken Griffin as a 'villain'

Watch Jeff Bezos blasts Mamdani for casting billionaire Ken Griffin as a 'villain' - New York Post on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00The piece is that we have a big budget gap, and so whether you're the federal government or whether you're

00:06a city, I mean, I was going to ask you about what you thought of the pied-a-terra tax

00:10in New York and what you thought of what happened with this Ken Griffin video that the mayor made.

00:18You have a place in the city.

00:19Yeah, there's two different, I think there are two different things about that video.

00:24On the one hand, it's perfectly fine to have a policy debate about whether you want to have a pied

00:31-a-terra tax.

00:32The second piece, which is not so good, is to go stand in front of Ken Griffin's house and act

00:38like he's some kind of villain.

00:40Ken Griffin isn't a villain. He hasn't hurt anybody. He's not hurting New York. In fact, quite the opposite.

00:44And so that piece of it isn't right, and there was no reason to do that.

00:50A pied-a-terra tax is a, you know, there's a very—taxes on out-of-towners are very popular taxes.

00:58That's why there are hotel taxes, and, you know, hotels always have very high tax rates because why not tax

01:04the tourists?

01:05And there are limits. If you raise the hotel taxes too much, tourists stop coming, right?

01:10So you have to be judicious. But I think that the pied-a-terra tax is a fine thing for

01:15New York to do, and, you know, they have to figure out how—

01:19But it's a policy debate.

01:21Right.

01:21Policy debates don't have to be finger-pointing.

01:25This is the piece that—

01:27So you're not going to sell your place in New York?

01:29Unfortunately, it's a—it's—it is an effective political technique. It's as old as the hills.

01:36So when you don't know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them.

01:42But it won't solve the problem.

01:44The only thing that will solve the problem is skill.

01:46Right.

01:46And so really it's a skills issue.

01:48You want to say that any corporate CFO worth their salt, the Amazon CFO, could find 3% in the

01:54federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon.

01:57This is—there is—there is so much waste in government spending.

02:01Right.