Eat the Rich, Valet the Bentley

I went looking for the billionaires Zohran Mamdani forgot to shame. I found them at the open bar, funding the seminar that explains why the open bar is a tool of oppression.

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974, Live Not by Lies)

Let me set the scene, because the New York Post got the numbers and I want the vibes.

On June 23, Chadwick Moore reported that Bobby and Carola Jain, owners of a $20 million townhouse on the Upper East Side and a ten-bedroom, nine-bathroom thing in Southampton that the listing calls a home and I call a Costco with sconces, have funneled north of $30 million into the Jain Family Institute. That is the nonprofit that produces academic PDFs explaining why landlords are a moral catastrophe. Capitalism for developers, communism for landlords, as their own magazine put it. I have read the article. I still do not know which bucket the guy who owns nine bathrooms falls into.

You have to understand the choreography here. Carola Jain has a background in marketing, which in this crowd means she once stood near a brand. She sits on the advisory board of Peggy Guggenheim's collection in Venice. She is, per her own website, building an agency to curate and promote NFT art and Web3 cultural experiences, a sentence I had to read out loud to a stranger on the subway to confirm it was real. She also, and I want to be gentle about this, invested in the Fyre Festival. The actual Fyre Festival. She helped arrange millions for the cheese-sandwich Coachella before getting swindled herself. This is the woman now bankrolling the roadmap to a planned economy. The cheese sandwich was a warning, Carola.

The cheese sandwich was the pilot program.

Bobby is the serious one. Twenty years at Credit Suisse. Co-chief investment officer at Millennium. Launched his own fund, Jain Global, raised $5.3 billion in 2024, posted modest gains, and handed the money back like a man returning a sweater that did not fit. He sits on Cornell's board of trustees as vice chair of the investment committee, which is how you get keffiyeh-clad undergrads filming videos about your Boeing exposure. The kids are mad he owns Caterpillar. The kids do not yet know he is also paying for their politics. Give them a semester.

Here is the part that made me put down my complimentary prosecco. In April, Mayor Mamdani stood outside Ken Griffin's apartment and filmed a little video to shame the billionaire. Very brave. Very viral. Griffin, crucially, funds no Mamdani-adjacent think tank. He is the wrong kind of rich. The Jains, who fund the magazine edited by one of Mamdani's own top fundraisers, got no video. They got nothing. They got the warm institutional silence of a mayor who knows exactly whose checks clear his agenda.

That fundraiser is Robert "Jack" Gross, editor-in-chief of Phenomenal World, the JFI magazine. Jack has raised over $20,000 for Mamdani. Jack celebrates Karl Marx Day, which I assume involves a cake nobody is allowed to own. Jack once posted that it was beautiful when crowds yelled obscene things at the NYPD, and that America is a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins. Jack is now editing think pieces with titles like "Why New York City Needs Public-Powered Pharmacies." The wickedness, apparently, ends at the pharmacy counter.

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The Jains' spokesman wants you to know they have no editorial control over the magazine and that JFI actually wound down this year after a decade of non-partisan, market-based work. Sure. I believe the part about no editorial control the way I believe the open bar is free. Somebody paid. The check has a name on it. The name is on the Cornell board and the Southampton deed and the Guggenheim advisory roster, and somehow it is never on the mayor's enemies list.

This is the trick, and it is an old one dressed in new Loro Piana. You do not have to control the magazine. You fund the magazine, the magazine builds the model, the administration installs the model, and you go back to Fashion Week front row next to Lady Gaga, who I am told was lovely. Everyone denies coordinating. Everyone is telling the truth. The machine runs anyway, lubricated by hedge-fund money and a mayor with a very selective camera.

So here is where I landed, somewhere around the third tray of passed tuna. Eat the rich is a great slogan. It photographs beautifully. But somebody has to cater it, and at this party, the somebody is a billionaire couple writing the menu, the manifesto, and the check, while the mayor films the one guy who forgot to RSVP.

The Receipts

$30M+ from the Jains to the Jain Family Institute (tax filings, per NY Post)

$5.3B raised by Jain Global in 2024, then returned to investors

$20K+ raised for Mamdani by Phenomenal World editor Jack Gross

1 shaming video, filmed outside Ken Griffin's home. Zero filmed outside the Jains'.

Source reporting: Chadwick Moore, New York Post, June 23, 2026. Scene and commentary: The Unredacted.