Billionaires (and their corporations) do not make for good neighbors. While they claim to bring prosperity for everyone, their primary concern is to capture our local governments and take whatever they can get from our communities in land, labor, and resources – all for their private profit. The result? Billionaires have become exponentially richer as the rest of us live with a growing affordability crisis. This series is about the impact billionaires have on our everyday lives when they move into our backyards.
It’s no secret that billionaires — and now, even a trillionaire — deeply influence U.S. politics and society at the national level. What’s given less attention, however, is the extent to which these same billionaires shape our lives at the local and state level.
This is true in New York, a state with the second-most billionaires in the U.S. — 136 of them as of 2025 — and the geographical home of Wall Street. From splurging on state and local elections to oppose progressive agendas, to promoting school privatization efforts that undermine public schools, to pushing unpopular data centers and cozying up with ICE, New York billionaires are working hard to advance elite interests that harm working people in the Empire State.
This article profiles four billionaires (including one family of billionaires) and how they have used their riches to bend state and local governments to their will, imposing their ideology on New Yorkers and diverting even more wealth from being used for the public good to their own pockets.
Daniel Loeb
Daniel Loeb is the founder and CEO of Third Point, a hedge fund that oversees around $21 billion in assets. Loeb is personally worth around $4 billion. Third Point, which was founded in 1995, is based in New York City.
For years, Loeb has deployed his huge fortune to become one of the most influential billionaires in New York State.
One key arena of Loeb’s interventions is electoral campaigns. Recently, along with other billionaire donors, Loeb gave $425,000 to three PACs in a failed effort to defeat Zohran Mamdani during the 2025 New York City mayoral race, where Mamdani ran on an agenda of affordability for working people. Furthermore, over the past two decades, Loeb and his wife have donated over $11.5 million toward New York statewide races. While their contributions have often backed Republicans, they’ve also donated to Democratic politicians like Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, giving $60,000 to the latter since 2021.
Loeb has also donated toward New York’s federal elections across the political aisle, including to Republicans Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin, and Democrats like Ritchie Torres. Additionally, Loeb has also given a total of $575,000 to the United Democracy Project and Democratic Majority for Israel, pro-Israel Super PACs aligned with AIPAC that have histories of donating heavily toward New York federal elections.
Loeb also is a huge donor nationally, having given millions to conservative Super PACs and Republican congressional candidates, and trying to defeat progressive candidates in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Loeb’s top cause may be promoting charter schools, which studies show divert funds away from public schools that working-class New Yorkers rely on (and unlike public, charter schools can cherry-pick their students). Indeed, Loeb is one of the top bankrollers and backers of New York’s corporate-driven school privatization operation.
Since 2012, Loeb has given nearly $5.4 million to “New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany,” a pro-charter school Super PAC. Since 2013, Loeb and his wife have given $640,000 to New Yorkers For Putting Students First, and since 2015, $600,000 to Great Public Schools PAC — both pro-charter school PACs. Great Public Schools PAC is an arm of Eva Moskowitz’s charter school movement. Moskowitz is the head of Success Academy charter schools, of which Loeb is a board member.
Billionaire charter school backers also help lead attacks on labor unions, particularly teachers’ unions. Charter schools help bust teachers’ unions because they aren’t required to have unionized teachers
Indeed, Loeb has a checkered history of incendiary comments around unions. For example, in 2016, Loeb called teachers unions “the biggest single force standing in the way of quality education and an organization that has done more to perpetuate poverty and discrimination against people of color than the KKK.”
Moreover, in 2017, Loeb stated that Senate Minority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Black state senator, had “done more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood” because she supported teachers’ unions. (Loeb later said he “regret[ted] the language” he used “in expressing my passion for educational choice.”)
Meanwhile, Loeb himself has enjoyed a life of luxury and immense wealth. In 2024, he sold his 14,000 square foot Miami Beach mansion for a cool $35.5 million. He also owned a luxury yacht, which he sold in 2023 — though in 2020, he faced controversy when it “damaged a pristine reef atoll in Belize,” according to Bloomberg.
Michael Bloomberg
If Dan Loeb is influential, Michael Bloomberg is billionaire power on steroids. Bloomberg, whose massive wealth springs from his financial information and media empire, is worth around $110 billion, making him the richest New Yorker.
Like Loeb, Bloomberg is a huge donor to New York state electoral campaigns. Time Magazine reports that he spent $13.3 million backing Andrew Cuomo and trying to defeat Zohran Mamdani’s successful 2025 mayoral campaign. Bloomberg has splurged $10 million on backing the current congressional run of New York assemblyman Micah Lasher, a former aide to Bloomberg as well as former policy director for Kathy Hochul. Lasher prevailed in a contested democratic primary in which Big Tech interests poured millions.
But all this pales in comparison to Bloomberg’s spending on his own campaigns. Indeed, it’s possible that no one has spent more on federal, state and local politics combined than Bloomberg — including more than $1 billion on his own failed 2020 presidential run and tens of millions on his successful New York City mayoral campaigns.
All told, Bloomberg has spent over $150 million on New York statewide elections over the past quarter century.
Like Loeb, Bloomberg’s main cause may be charter schools. The megabillionaire has spent massive amounts on the school privatization movement, including giving millions in total to pro-charter PACs like New Yorkers for a Stronger Future, New Yorkers For A Balanced Albany, and New Yorkers For Putting Students First. During the 2026 election cycle, he ramped up his pro-charter spending.
In 2021, Bloomberg made headlines for pledging $750 million to expand charter schools — all at a time, noted the Washington Post, “when the charter school movement [had] come under scrutiny from public education advocates” who said it was taking “needed public funding from traditional districts that educate most children.”
Bloomberg is also a big spender on pro-charter school campaigns nationally. For example, he gave $1 million to a pro-charter candidate for the Los Angeles Board of Education in 2013.
Bloomberg has faced significant controversies. As New York City mayor, he escalated “stop and frisk” policing measures that targeted Black and Brown people. Nor has Bloomberg been shy about this. Speaking at the Aspen Institute in 2015, Bloomberg stated that “people say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana. They’re all minorities,” adding, “Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do you do it? Because that’s where all the crime is.”
Bloomberg subsequently tried to block the video with these comments from getting out to the public.
Bloomberg has also come under criticism for his company’s practice of having departing employees sign disclosure agreements, where they “agree to never speak ill of the company,” reports the New York Times, or otherwise leave “emptyhanded.” The result, said the NYT, is that former Bloomberg workers “are barred from publicly describing misconduct and what they perceived as an entrenched culture of bullying, where women are often objectified and sometimes face discrimination.”
For his part, Bloomberg enjoys a lavish life, owning a huge portfolio of expensive properties across New York City, the Hamptons, London, Bermuda, Colorado, and Florida.
Marc Rowan
Meanwhile, another New York megabillionaire, Marc Rowan, has emerged as a top-tier corporate powerbroker in New York and beyond.
Rowan, worth nearly $8 billion, is the cofounder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s top private equity firms. Apollo has been mired in controversy because Rowan’s fellow cofounder and the former head, Leon Black, was a close and longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein. Evidence has also accumulated that Rowan had — in the words of one outlet — “extensive dealings” with Epstein.
Currently in New York state, Apollo is one of the faces of data center expansion, with its portfolio company, STREAM Data Centers, proposing a huge, deeply unpopular data center complex in the small town of Alabama, New York, located halfway between Buffalo and Rochester. The data center proposal by Apollo’s STREAM is a whopping $19.5 billion project. The developers are asking for an astounding $1.44 billion in tax exemptions for the project — corporate kickbacks that will ultimately trickle up to Rowan and Apollo.
Local opposition to the data center has been broad and deep, with the strongest protests coming from the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, whose reservation borders the site of the proposed data center. All this comes as data centers have emerged as widely despised projects among people in the U.S. across any other political differences.
Along with financing and profiting from data center expansion in New York state, Rowan’s actions are impacting New Yorkers in other ways. Rowan is an architect of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education, and he’s been a driving force against the Palestine solidarity movements on campuses. Rowan is also an executive board member of Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” in Gaza.
Like other backyard billionaires, Rowan has donated to political races in New York and beyond. He’s contributed $136,050 to New York State races since 2021, including a $75,000 donation in May 2026 to Greater Empire State, a Super PAC which so far has not disclosed any activity other than raising money from Rowan and from Extell Development chairman Gary Bennett.
Moreover, Rowan has contributed over $2 million across more than 900 donations over the past 15 years toward federal candidates and PACs, including millions toward electing congressional Republicans and millions more to AIPAC-aligned and pro-charter schools Super PACs. He’s also previously donated to Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and Ritchie Torres.
In recent years, Rowan has been buying up tens of millions of dollars worth of properties up in the Hamptons, in the top billionaire enclaves in the U.S.
The Jacobs family
A slightly lesser known but deeply influential backyard billionaire — in this case, billionaire family — hails from Western New York.
The Jacobs family, led by patriarch Jeremy Jacobs Sr., is worth $5.4 billion. The family fortune comes from their ownership of Delaware North, a concessions empire that ranks among the top privately-owned corporations in the U.S. On the side, the Jacobs own the Boston Bruins, one of the iconic National Hockey League franchises.
For years, the Delaware North Building in downtown Buffalo, which houses Delaware North’s global headquarters, has also been the home of ICE’s field office in Buffalo. For nearly a decade, local organizers have protested ICE’s presence in the Delaware North Building, and there’s currently a campaign to pressure the Jacobs’ to use their leverage to kick ICE out of the building (owned by Uniland Development) when ICE’s lease expires in March 2027.
From banks and charities to universities to art museums, the Jacobs family has its hands all over Buffalo’s power structure. And beyond the ICE controversy, Delaware North also has close ties to Governor Kathy Hochul that raise major concerns over conflicts of interest.
Kathy’s husband, Bill Hochul, was Delaware North’s general counsel from 2016 to 2023, during which time the Jacobs’ family corporation paid him as much as $5.35 million. Even after he left Delaware North, Bill Hochul has continued to receive deferred compensation from the company. In 2025 Bill Hochul was paid between $100,000 and $150,000 from Delaware North according to Governor Hochul’s personal financial disclosure, more than the annual income of the median family in the state of New York.
Delaware North has long benefited from public subsidies, and the Jacobses have also been major donors to top New York State politicians. All told, the Jacobs family has given at least $162,000 to Kathy Hochul’s 2026 reelection campaign, and they also gave at least $74,750 to Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 gubernatorial campaign — and all this after Cuomo intervened to help obtain subsidies for Delaware North’s corporate headquarters.
The Jacobses also donate nationally, and to the other side of the political aisle. For example, they gave at least $167,000 to committees supporting Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election and to Trump’s inauguration.
Billionaires like Loeb, Bloomberg, Rowan and the Jacobses have wielded their massive wealth and influence toward attempts to bend New York State politics toward their interests. Nor are these billionaires going unchallenged: from campaigns like Invest in Our New York that are seeking to tax the rich to invest in public goods, to grassroots organizing against Marc Rowan’s data centers and the Jacobs’ ties to ICE in Buffalo, resistance to billionaire power and influence exists across the state.
But to be sure, Loeb, Bloomberg, Rowan and the Jacobses are just a small sample of billionaires in our backyards — in New York and beyond, as this series will continue to show.