Mamdani Builds a Business Council — Without Wall Street or Big Tech

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has named a 15-member Business Advisory Council spanning finance, real estate, health care, technology, sport and retail — an attempt to repair relations between a democratic socialist administration and the city's executive class.

The members include Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, Etsy chief executive Kruti Patel Goyal, RXR chairman Scott Rechler and New York Liberty chief executive Keia Clarke.

Read the absences

The list is most informative for who is not on it. No current executives from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, American Express or BlackRock. None from Meta or Alphabet. For a council convened in the financial capital of the world, the omission of large-cap banking is not an oversight.

JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon said last year he would offer to help Mamdani if he won, while describing his movement as "more Marxist than socialist" — a sentence that captures the arrangement precisely. Cooperation is available; endorsement is not.

What a council can and cannot do

Advisory bodies have no statutory power. Their function is signalling: to reassure employers that an administration will listen before it legislates, and to give the administration cover when it does.

On that measure this one half-works. Consumer brands, real estate and sport give Mamdani a room of employers to consult. The absence of the banks means the industries most exposed to his tax agenda are still negotiating through the press rather than across a table.