The AppLovin Money Behind Mamdani's Rise
The money behind Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign, and a wave of primary challenges to pro-Israel Democrats across the country, traces back to two men who spent years at a Chinese-backed advertising company. That company is now under scrutiny from short sellers, a state attorney general filing, and JPMorgan Chase's own compliance desk.
Omer Hasan and Mohammad Waqas Javed are the largest donors to American Priorities, a super PAC formed this year that has already spent more than $10 million backing primary challengers who campaign against AIPAC's influence. Tablet's Liel Leibovitz reported the group put roughly $2 million behind Adam Hamawy, a physician who testified on behalf of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirator known as the blind sheikh. Another $2 million went into New York races that unseated Congressman Dan Goldman and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and the group added $150,000 in TV ads to help elect democratic socialist Melat Kiros in Colorado.
Public reporting has described Hasan and Javed only as former Silicon Valley executives about whom little is publicly known. That description leaves out the important part. Both are alumni of AppLovin, the mobile advertising and data company founded in 2012.
AppLovin's record is the evidence box here, and it goes back further than most coverage has acknowledged. In September 2016, AppLovin agreed to sell a majority stake to Orient Hontai Capital, a Chinese private equity firm owned by Orient Securities, in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. CEO Adam Foroughi said at the time he chose Orient Hontai "because of their strong connections in the Chinese market." The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States objected on national security grounds tied to data access, and by November 2017 the acquisition collapsed. It was replaced with an $841 million debt financing arrangement structured so Orient Hontai would take no formal control, on top of $140 million the Chinese firm had already put in for a 9.98% stake. The workaround let AppLovin keep a Chinese state-linked financier close without triggering the review that killed the buyout.
The Chinese connection did not end there. One of the company's largest current investors, Hao Tang, owned 3.2% of AppLovin as of 2025 regulatory filings, worth roughly $4.6 billion. Other reporting puts his controlled stake, through shell entities, at 9.8% of Class A shares, making him the largest individual shareholder besides Foroughi himself.
In February, short seller CapitalWatch was forced to apologize and revise a report tying Tang to criminal syndicates across Asia. The retraction did not end the scrutiny. The following month, JPMorgan Chase closed Tang's private banking account over know your customer concerns, despite the account generating millions of dollars in fees for the bank. Banks do not walk away from that kind of revenue lightly. It is usually a sign the bank could not verify who it was actually banking, or where the money originated.
Last June, Culper Research, an activist short seller group based in New York, published a report alleging Tang's deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The report also found that AppLovin, despite publicly denying it operates inside China, signed agency agreements in January 2025 with two Chinese ad tech firms, BlueFocus Intelligence and eClickTech, both already under scrutiny for consumer surveillance and ad fraud.
Hasan and Javed have both left AppLovin. NYC campaign finance records list Hasan as retired and Javed as CEO of Showcase Commerce. The pair moved from tech into political finance, starting with New Yorkers for Lower Costs, a PAC built around a single goal: electing Zohran Mamdani mayor. Neither man is a registered New York resident. Each gave Mamdani's PAC $250,000, making them, alongside heiress Elizabeth Simons, the largest donors to the mayor's campaign infrastructure.
A third former AppLovin employee, Tariq Afaq Ahmed, added another $500,000 to American Priorities, according to FEC filings. It is the same PAC building operation, run twice. Fund the mayor. Then fund the mayor's ideological cousins in Congress.
This is a familiar shape to readers of our earlier reporting on the Singham network, where ICAP coordination, Chinese and Cuban-aligned capital, and American nonprofit infrastructure moved money into DSA's electoral machinery well before Mamdani's name appeared on a ballot. Read: How America Lost The Campus The mechanism differs here. This is not ideological front funding through nonprofits, it is direct PAC contributions from named individuals. But the pattern is the same: money with a foreign-linked origin story, laundered through the ordinary appearance of grassroots small-dollar politics, landing on the same candidate and the same administration.
The record shows two men who spent their careers at a company whose largest shareholder had his bank account closed over identity concerns, and whose stock a research firm tied to Beijing's party structure. Now they are spending eight figures to reshape the Democratic Party's approach to Israel from the inside.
Reporting in this piece draws on Liel Leibovitz's original investigation, "AppLovin's Revenge," published in Tablet Magazine on July 7, 2026, with additional sourcing from CFIUS filings, Reuters, and Fortune. Read the full Tablet piece at tabletmag.com.
