Citadel CEO Ken Griffin praised Rahm Emanuel’s tenure as former mayor of Chicago while attacking Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker for his handling of crime and education issues — two Democrats seen as potential presidential contenders —  during a panel at the annual Milken Institute Global Conference on Tuesday. 

The billionaire hedge fund magnate and major Republican donor has held a longstanding feud with Pritzker over his state’s economic, crime and education policies to the point that he moved his firm’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami, Florida.

Griffin said his acrimonious relationship with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was “triggering of the trauma I went through in Chicago.” Citadel has a major presence in New York City, but Griffin has threatened not to proceed with a major planned development in Manhattan due to Mamdani’s use of Griffin’s property there to promote a tax on luxury second homes.

“Chicago went through a renaissance during most of my 30 years there,” Griffin said on Tuesday. “Under the leadership of JB Pritzker, [former Chicago Mayor] Lori Lightfoot and the current mayor [Brandon Johnson], it has just evolved into a state that has lost its way. … This is really a story of the progressive left. I mean, when Rahm Emanuel was there, I think he did an extraordinary job of helping to deal with the issues that we had in our public schools and that we had with crime on the streets.”

Griffin touted the work he did with the Emanuel administration to get the city to “use digital technology to forecast what crime could occur.”

“I helped to fund this work, and we would actually pre-position police officers in these crime hotspots. We brought murder rates down in one of the most difficult neighborhoods by 50% in less than two years. That’s lives saved. That’s both political leadership, thought leadership and execution from our police department,” he said. 

“We saw that JB Pritzkers and Lori Lightfoots of the world dismantle these gains that we were making that we’re really improving the lives of people who depend upon good government to make their lives better.”

Griffin said violent crime was “the biggest problem” that caused him to leave the state, telling Eisen that “I had a colleague stabbed outside the door of our building. I had a colleague’s house burned down by an arsonist. I could just go on for the next 10 minutes about muggings, about bullets flying through people’s cars.”

“It became impossible to recruit people to Illinois, because of the question they posed: ‘I love the job, I love the people, but will my family be safe here?’” he continued. “You couldn’t look somebody in the eyes and go, ‘Your family will be safe here.’ You couldn’t. The best you could do is, ‘I hope they will be.’”

The Citadel chief executive said his team’s conversations with Mamdani’s City Hall have “made clear … that we need to double down on our bet in Miami.”

“We want to be in a state that embraces business, that embraces education, that embraces personal freedom and liberty and that embraces people having an opportunity to live the American dream,” Griffin said. “It’s a dream of earned success, not a dream of redistributive handouts that lead people dependent on government for their lives and their livelihoods in a way that takes away community and honor.”

On the U.S. war with Iran, Griffin backed the rationale for the war while criticizing the Trump administration for not being transparent enough with the American public. 

“I applaud the president for having the willingness to actually try to ensure a nuclear-free Middle East,” Griffin said. “I don’t think he has made that case strongly for the American people, but we should all sleep better knowing that he has set back the Iranians and their nuclear ambitions for years, if not decades, over the course of his time as president.”

Asked by Eisen about the lack of broad support domestically for the war, Griffin reiterated his view that the president has not made a “strong enough” case to the public for launching the war, but continued to defend its mission.

“A nuclear Iran would put into question the safety and security of the people of our nation,” Griffin said. “I think that they have made many good decisions here, but they have encountered something that they did not anticipate, which is a military capacity by Iran and a commitment to the preservation of the regime that is completely different to what they saw in Venezuela. In some sense, the extraordinary success of Venezuela almost certainly led all of us to believe that we could have some remarkable success in Iran,” he added, referencing the U.S. mission to oust former dictator Nicholas Maduro.

Griffin also noted that the Iranian military had not yet “been defeated,” counter to Trump’s claims, which Griffin described as a “stalemate situation” that was causing energy prices to rise. He said that the U.S. is “largely shielded from that” from a holistic standpoint, but that individual consumers are not.