Whitney Tilson — the Biden-bashing Wall Street investor who was among the first Democrats to demand the president exit the 2024 election race — is running for New York City mayor, The Post has learned.
The 58-year-old financier, long known for his prolific newsletters, podcasts and CNBC appearances, filed the paperwork late Monday with a vow to slash crime by 50%, tackle corruption and solve the migrant crisis, he told The Post in an exclusive interview.
The married father of three said he decided to launch a bid for the June 2025 primary after Kamala Harris’s disastrous showing on Nov. 5 — which he partly blamed on militant left-wingers that he says are destroying his party.
“Our government charges us the highest taxes of any city in the country, but fails to deliver,” Tilson told The Post. “The vast majority of those leaving the city are low- and middle-income residents who are fed up with crime and disorder and can no longer afford to live here.”
It will be Tilson’s first foray into front-line politics, although he co-founded the Democrats for Education Reform in 2007 that looked to take on the powerful public school teachers unions and served for more than two decades on the board of a charter school in the South Bronx.
He joins a crowded field of candidates hoping to unseat incumbent Eric Adams, tainted by a federal indictment for allegedly accepting bribes, with most of his rivals running to the left of the current mayor.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo is hotly tipped to join the race should Adams end up not running.
Tilson, a multimillionaire disciple of Warren Buffett, says his campaign will join the Campaign Finance Board’s program that sees donations matched 8-to-1, meaning a $250 donation nets a candidate $2,000 in city taxpayer money.
He added that his campaign won’t accept a single dollar from any organization that does business with the Big Apple’s local government — relying solely on smaller donations to raise the legal cap of $7.9 million.
“I lead a comfortable life by anyone’s standards but by the standards of my Upper East Side friends, I am the poor one. I love Michael Bloomberg’s policies, but I don’t have his bank account. We will adhere to the spending limits. No one will be trying to buy the mayor’s office.”
Tilson’s idea to crack down on the most crime-ridden areas of New York is to declare a state of emergency in those hot spots, allowing authorities to “flood” those neighborhoods with more officers.
“Defund the police” are the three stupidest words of all time,” he told The Post. “50% of the violent crime occurs in 3.5% of the city’s blocks.”
“I’m talking about increasing the police presence and I want to have judges on call 24/7 to issue search warrants on as quickly as possible.”
Tilson likewise slammed Joe Biden’s administration for “committing a horrific mistake to effectively open the doors” and allow millions of migrants into the US.
“I am not a supporter of Donald Trump’s proposal to round up 12 million illegal immigrants and throw them out of the country. I think it is — on a practical basis — impossible.
“I, however, absolutely support Trump’s proposal to identify either dangerous people who are known to be gang members or anyone who commits any kind of serious crime, I don’t see why, as a country, we shouldn’t put them on the next plane home.”
The ex-Kase Capital supremo said he would keep New York’s status as a sanctuary city, but look to scrap reforms by former mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014 and 2018 that stopped officials here from working with federal authorities.
The laws prohibit the NYPD, Department of Correction and Department of Probation from cooperating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency unless the cases involve suspected terrorists or other serious public safety risks.
“This was a sort of knee jerk radical left response to Trump getting elected the first time; they doubled down on the sanctuary city stuff,” Tilson said.
Changes to the rules have always been bitterly opposed by hard-left members of the New York City council.
But the veteran investor would work with the president-elect when “it comes to removing criminals from our city who are not citizens.”
The author and investment adviser also said he wants to shake up New York’s building regulations to make it easier to build more affordable housing because the market is “so tight and ossified.”
“With the cost of living in general so high, the single biggest piece of that is housing to rent or buy… the price of anything is a function of supply and demand,” he told the Post. “The demand is there, and there has been almost no new supply.”
“We have a 1.4% vacancy rate in the city. Housing costs are astronomical, yet it is nearly impossible to build new housing due to just unbelievable regulations, and particularly these ‘not in my backyard’ NIMBY zoning restrictions,” Tilson added.
Tilson also said he would ban NYC officials from accepting anything “more than a cup of coffee” to root out “the deep-rooted corruption” that he brands as the City Hall “blob” and rein in “out of control spending.”
“(Mayor Adams) turned out to be corrupt, and he’s hired a lot of people who have turned out to be corrupt,” the former hedge funder added.
New York City “is run by career politicians who have been captured by an army of well-heeled insiders,
activists, consultants, lobbyists, unions and special interests, all looking out solely for themselves,” he said.
“I’m a proud Democrat. Sometimes not so proud. But my goal is to improve my party and drag my party away from the radical leftists back to the center, because until we do so the cities and the states that we control are going to keep going in the wrong direction,” Tilson said.
“I am running an insurgent campaign, going straight to the voters and telling them what I believe, which is the Democratic machine has been over taxing and under serving you for decades.” he added.
