As New Yorkers head to the polls tomorrow, at least 26 billionaires have tried to stop frontrunner Zohran Mamdani from helming America’s largest city. But two have actually backed his run.
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who says billionaires should not exist, has nonetheless received contributions from Elizabeth Simons, daughter of the late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons, and GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner. Both wrote checks to the primary independent group backing Mamdani’s campaign, New Yorkers For Lower Costs, representing about 10% of the money the group has taken in.
But of course, the forces against the Democratic candidate are stronger, with a Forbes analysis revealing billionaires have spent more than $22 million opposing Mamdani’s rise.
Food stamp benefits ran dry for roughly 42 million Americans, and President Donald Trump said he has instructed White House lawyers to ask courts for more clarity on how his administration can legally fund the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program “as soon as possible.” Two judges ordered the use of emergency funds to continue funding the program during the shutdown, though the Trump Administration has argued the Agriculture Department lacks the legal authority to do so.
In a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, Trump said he will allow Nvidia and Beijing to make deals on AI chips, but will not allow Nvidia’s most advanced semiconductors to be sold to China, a comment that comes days after he signaled willingness to discuss export controls on Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chips. Nvidia’s shares rose 1.4% in premarket trading early on Monday, after becoming the first company to surpass a $5 trillion market cap last week.
The Trump Administration has halted nearly all of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s activity, a regulatory rollback that benefits financial institutions but leaves consumers vulnerable at a time when they are particularly stretched from inflation. At least $120 million in settlements owed to consumers has stayed in companies’ pockets, as 22 CFPB enforcement actions have been permanently dismissed. If the administration continues its efforts, millions more may not reach consumers.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he believes some sectors of the economy are in a recession or at risk of one, blaming the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates fast. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point last Wednesday, the second time in two months, as President Donald Trump has called for more aggressive rate cuts since taking office.
Reddit, which has exploded in popularity in recent years, just reported its most profitable quarter yet, leading its stock to gain more than 7% Friday. The stock’s recent gains have made cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman a billionaire, with a net worth of $1.2 billion, as he praised the platform’s ability to be “for humans by humans.”
Amazon’s post-earnings Wall Street rally boosted Jeff Bezos’ net worth by as much as $24 billion, with the world’s third-richest person’s fortune totaling around $254.3 billion at the close of last week. The company’s shares skyrocketed 10% Friday, and the firm largely attributed its earnings bump to the growth of Amazon Web Services.
Companies continue to pour money into AI investments—but so far, the return on investment for AI use cases has been limited. That’s because while models have been trained on an entire internet’s worth of text, there’s less scrapable training data for real-world tasks, like specialized data entry or spreadsheet manipulation. “To do a job, you need to be able to learn on the job,” said Robert Nishihara, cofounder of Anyscale, a company that provides AI software infrastructure.