Dave Portnoy didn’t mince words after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race — calling it confirmation that he was right to get out of the city.
The Barstool Sports founder, who previously revealed he’d discussed relocating the company’s headquarters out of Manhattan, reacted on X Wednesday morning: “If this is what the people of NYC want, than [sic] so be it. Thank god I don’t live there anymore.”
Just last month, Portnoy told viewers on a livestream that he’d already started conversations with Barstool’s “finance guys” about moving. “Honestly, I’ve given that a lot of thought… going to Hoboken or Jersey City or something,” he said. “I don’t want to f---ing have an office (in Manhattan).”
In a July interview with FOX Business, Portnoy slammed Mamdani — a 34-year-old self-described democratic socialist — as “one of the worst, scariest candidates” in modern politics. “He hates capitalism,” Portnoy said. “He wants a fundamental shift in what has built this country, and he doesn’t really particularly hide it.”
Portnoy also accused Mamdani of sympathizing with extremists, pointing to the assemblyman’s 2013 criticism of Boston police for allegedly not reading bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights after the Boston Marathon attack. “His reaction to that [the bombing] is, ‘How did the police not read this guy the Miranda rights when he’s sitting in a boat,’ not the people he killed,” Portnoy said. “This is somebody in a city where 9/11 happened. He’d be quicker to blame the finance people in the building than the people who flew the planes into the buildings.”
Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa in Tuesday’s election, becoming the first socialist to lead New York City in nearly a century — and signaling a sharp left turn for America’s largest metropolis.