yonderbarn

The first is Elizabeth Simons, the daughter of the late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons (d. 2024) who shares a $32.5 billion fortune with her stepmother Marilyn and two siblings. She cut a check for $250,000 to New Yorkers For Lower Costs, the main independent group backing Mamdani’s campaign, in August.

GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner, 45, is Mamdani’s other billionaire backer; in April, he sent New Yorkers For Lower Costs a check for $20,000. Preston-Werner, also a Bay Area resident, started the software development platform in 2008 and became a billionaire after Microsoft bought the company for $7.5 billion in 2018; his net worth is about $1 billion today, Forbes estimates. He now runs a venture capital firm called Preston-Werner Ventures.

“Now, do the Mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t. But in speaking with him, it’s clear that we share broad and crucial priorities: the importance of public safety, the need to continue driving down crime, and the need to maintain stability and order across the department. We also agree that you deserve the city’s respect and support.”

He was interviewed on Majority Report and Emma Vigeland promoted him on X as running to the left of Hochul. Krystal Ball also claimed he was a leftist.

As a former representative, he voted with Biden 100% of the time. Even Politico identified him as a moderate. He's also a former corporate lawyer.

In this interview, he denied to be labeled as a progressive.

It's unfortunate we don't have any other options. If only we could get Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout, or Jumaane Williams to run again.

https://xcancel.com/ICEgov/status/1986821339810820479#m

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner says his six months in Afghanistan in 2018 as a State Department security contractor revealed how America’s wars had become “a corporate money-grab.” He clarified he never worked for Erik Prince’s Blackwater but for a hedge-fund-owned successor that inherited its State Department contracts. “They used guys like me with these backgrounds to meet the contract requirements so they could pay us bare minimum and walk away with the balance.”

Platner said his job mostly involved driving for the U.S. ambassador’s security team. “We were barely leaving the Green Zone… All I did was lift weights and play video games. I got huge and I played a lot of Far Cry,” he said.

He quit after six months and went home to farm oysters.

https://www.andreforthebronx.nyc/

Instead, Gates argues, the world’s philanthropists must increase their investment in other efforts aimed at preventing disease and hunger.

Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity, he argued, and past efforts that strive for achieving zero carbon emissions have made real progress. But Gates said that past investments fighting climate change have been misplaced, and too much good money has been put into expensive and questionable efforts.

Although Gates said investment to battle climate change must continue, he argued that President Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID threaten a more urgent problem, inflicting potentially lasting global damage to the fight against famine and life-threatening preventable sickness.

“Climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems,” Gates wrote. “We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”

The Trump administration’s funding cuts, Gates argues, necessitate an immediate and larger focus on investment and resources to support those abandoned efforts.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”

The incumbent: "Goldman is among the wealthiest members of Congress, with an estimated personal net worth of up to $253 million"

Potential 2028 candidate?

The coming months will test the limits of the New York governor’s ability to work alongside a fickle president who is detested by fellow Democrats, with her 2026 reelection potentially at stake. Mamdani’s base will press Hochul to give him left-leaning victories, like a tax increase on rich New Yorkers that the governor opposes. If that’s not enough pressure, Trump has made clear he’ll exert his power over the city if Mamdani wins.

Hochul is walking a very delicate line. She needs Trump’s ear to ensure that funding for crucial infrastructure projects and anti-terrorism efforts will continue to flow. Yet the governor, who is being challenged in a primary by her lieutenant governor Antonio Delgado, can’t be seen as too chummy with a president who is loathed by her own party. Waiting in the wings is Trump ally Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is weighing a bid against the governor.

The situation creates an uncomfortable bind for Hochul, who has cobbled together a surprising rapport with the mercurial president, as evidenced by several White House meetings with him this year. She speaks to Trump frequently on the phone, often calling him directly. In public, Hochul has been eager to castigate the president when she believes his policies will harm New York. But a Mamdani win stands to upend this carefully constructed dynamic.

“I’m not going to send a lot of money to New York. I don’t have to. You know, the money comes all through the White House,” Trump said recently. “And if they’re going to be sending us stupid policies, I mean, communist policies… we’re not going to ruin one of our great cities.”

Hochul has pledged to “fight like hell” to oppose any cuts to the deep blue city, whose voters she will need to win reelection next year and where the president is deeply unpopular. The governor, too, believes Trump doesn’t want to do anything that would hurt his hometown, where he still retains significant business interests.

“Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,” Mr. Mamdani said at the debate. “I’ve said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence.”

@16:43: "I wish [the debate] was more like Nascar, so New Yorkers could see the billionaires sponsoring [Cuomo] right on his suit jacket."