Markets 
Nothing says “eat the rich” like paying for the knives and forks.
A hedge fund billionaire and his art groupie wife are pumping millions into socialist thinktanks positioned to help New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani achieve his Democratic Socialists of America-backed “worker’s paradise.”
The pair are on a mission to punish landlords and railroad more New Yorkers into government housing, The Post has learned.
From their $20 million Upper East Side townhouse — and their 10-bedroom, nine-bathroom, 10,000-square-foot Hamptons McMansion — Bobby and Carola Jain write checks funding Mamdani-linked intelligentsia paid to create models of how far-left concepts like universal basic income (UBI) and a decommodification of the housing market would work.
It’s the kind of anti-capitalist thinking that has some economists throwing up their hands.
“It must be one of those cults where you have to show you’re a member by mouthing absurd emperor’s [new] clothes nonsense,” John Cochrane, an economist at Stanford University, told The Post.
“[16th century Grand Duke of Tuscany] Cosimo I de’ Medici supported art because he worried about getting into heaven as a rich man. I wish our guilty billionaires would support great classical art instead of stupid social causes,” he added.
Whether motivated by guilt, social climbing or shrewd business acumen, the Jains join a growing list of ultra-wealthy benefactors — also including George Soros and Neville Singham — who made their billions through the capitalist system selling software or shorting markets, but now espouse the joys of socialism and sharing the wealth from their ivory towers.
Their patronage means they have so far avoided any surprise house calls from Mamdani, who is on a blitz against the rich and, in April, filmed a viral video outside the Billionaire’s Row home of investor Ken Griffin intended to shame wealthy folks.
The stunt sparked a feud between the two, with the hedge fund boss calling the mayor’s visit “creepy” and “weird.”
Jain, a Queens native, built a high-power finance career over 20 years at Credit Suisse in senior roles, later becoming co-chief investment officer at Millennium Management, one of the world’s largest hedge funds.
He left to launch his own hedge fund, Jain Global, which raised a massive $5.3 billion at launch in 2024, but after making only modest gains in 2025, he returned all cash to investors and the company now manages money exclusively for Millenium.
Jain’s socialist socialite wife Carola has a background in marketing but now mainly works in deciding where to allocate the family’s capital.
According to tax filings, the Jains have pumped over $30 million into their Jain Family Institute. The nonprofit builds out models for large-scale cash transfers to the downtrodden and creates roadmaps to UBI, advocating for a redistribution-focused economy, while publishing supportive analysis of Mamdani-esque policies like free buses and rent freezes.
“My rich conservative hedge fund friends don’t get kudos at the Met Gala,” said Cochrane. “As for the actual [JFI] policies, they are well-tried and well-proven disasters.”
Neither the Jains nor JFI responded to The Post’s requests for comment.
Top Mamdani fundraiser Robert “Jack” Gross is editor-in-chief of JFI’s magazine, “Phenomenal World,” which endorses a “capitalism for developers, communism for landlords” approach to New York’s housing troubles.
JFI outlets push decommodification rhetoric around housing which is critical of private capital and advocates a shift away from private landlords to public or nonprofit models.
“Only public ownership offers an escape from the mounting pressure. If New York moves towards a model of social housing, it will be because public ownership is consistent with stable rents in a way that ownership by private investors fundamentally is not,” an excerpt from one “Phenomenal World” article reads.
In an interview with John Roemer titled “Exploitation, Cooperation, and Distributive Justice” the Marxist economist told JFI’s magazine America’s most radical lefty leaders are still too conservative.
“Socialism is back on the agenda in the United States, which is very exciting. Nevertheless, what people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling socialism is in fact just a series of economic reforms that don’t alter property relations,” he said.
Gross is part of a three-person team that runs the NYC Policy Forum blog — which is also backed by JFI.
That blog launched in December 2025 after Mamdani won the election to become mayor and is positioned as a way to help implement his socialist agenda. Headlines read, “Making Mamdani’s Insurance Plan Work,” “Why New York City Needs Public-Powered Pharmacies,” “Three Things to Avoid When Building Public Grocery Stores” and “Tax the Rich.”
Gross, who has deep ties to the DSA, has publicly praised father of communism Karl Marx, celebrated “Karl Marx Day” and shared passages from the pinko philosopher’s Communist Manifesto. He also raised over $20,000 for Mamdani’s campaign.
In June 2020, Gross wrote on social media that it was “beautiful” when New Yorkers yelled “NYPD suck my d—k” — a common refrain heard during the George Floyd riots that summer.
“I must admit I do believe America is a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins,” he wrote a few months later.
Students at Cornell University — where Bobby Jain sits on the board of trustees and serves as vice chair of the investment committee — aren’t buying it.
Earlier this year, the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine shared a video on social media outraged that a man holding the school’s purse strings was invested in companies like Boeing and Caterpillar through his Jain Global.
One keffiyeh-clad undergrad claimed those companies “make bombers and bulldozers that murder and displace Palestinians.”
“We refuse to let the board of trustees make us complicit in the genocide, oppression and dispossession of people all around the world,” said another student in the video, calling out Jain and two other board members.
Meanwhile, when Carola isn’t seated front row at Fashion Week in New York or rubbing shoulders with pop star Lady Gaga, A-list actor Hugh Jackman and performance artist Marina Abramović during Hamptons charity galas, she sits on the advisory board for Peggy Guggenheim’s art collection in Venice.
She is also a member of the board at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and is “building a new cultural arts and technology agency to curate, produce and promote NFT art and Web3 cultural experiences,” according to her website.
The art buff got conned by 2017’s Fyre Festival scandal, the ultra-luxury music festival weekend in the Bahamas pitched to influencers and young professionals, which turned out to be a con and abject disaster.
Stranded attendees arrived to find no proper food, housing or entertainment. The guy running it, Billy McFarland, had oversold and underdelivered so badly he later went to prison for wire fraud.
Carola had bought into the scheme early and became an investor, helping arrange millions in funding for the project before she herself was swindled.
Read the full article here
