At a panel in Harlem in February, New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani discussed a piece of proposed legislation that would strip Columbia University of various tax breaks and redirect the revenue to fund the City’s university system. Mamdani’s no stranger to Columbia—his father is a Harvard-educated, renowned professor there, and he grew up in university-owned housing. “Columbia was our first landlord,” he told the crowd, according to an account in the student newspaper.

Today, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, proudly rejects the elite circles—his mother, also Harvard-educated, is an award-winning director—where he got his start. He lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, owns no car and lists just one major asset in his financial disclosure, several acres of land in his native Uganda that he acquired at least a decade ago. And his social media-savvy outsider campaign to become New York’s next mayor has carried him to polling neck-and-neck with the other frontrunner, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who’s pitching himself as an experienced hand on the wheel in a turbulent time. No matter what happens in the Democratic primary today, many believe that both men will stay in the race to run on a third party line.

Mamdani and Cuomo’s life stories share more parallels than one might think, given their divergent political approaches. Cuomo also had a privileged upbringing, as the son of a lawyer who eventually became the governor of New York and as the one-time husband of a Kennedy. Both men rent their apartments—though Cuomo pays almost four times as much for his two-bedroom in Midtown Manhattan—and neither one owns any property in the city. Both are trying to sell themselves as the true avatars of the working class despite their upbringings, with Mamdani running on freezing rent and making New York buses free while Cuomo emphasizes public safety issues. Where they diverge is their net worth: Forbes estimates Mamdani to be worth around $200,000, fifty times less than Cuomo, who we peg at $10 million.

Mamdani was born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, in 1991, the same year his Indian-American filmmaker mother Mira Nair released her second movie, “Mississippi Masala,” starring Denzel Washington. That was just three years after her debut feature film “Salaam Bombay!,” which depicted the lives of children living in the city’s slums, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (She is also known for “Monsoon Wedding,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival.) The family moved to New York City when Mamdani was seven years old, after his father, Mahmood Mamdani, got a job teaching at Columbia University.

The younger Mamdani attended Bank Street, a prestigious Manhattan private school that now costs as much as $66,000 a year for elementary school students, before graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s best public schools. Next, he studied Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts school in Maine that is also the alma mater of Netflix’s Reed Hastings and former American Express CEO Ken Chenault.

After graduating in 2014, he worked on his mother’s sets, tried his hand at a rap career—reportedly, using the monikers Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom, including the single “Nani,” which featured actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey—and took jobs working on several political campaigns and community organizing efforts, per a review of former resumes by The New York Times. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018, then found stability: In 2020, Mamdani ran for a state assembly seat and won, beating a five-term incumbent. The job pays $142,000 annually—much more than the $1,000 in rap royalties he reported in 2024. Today, he lives in a $2,250/month rent-stabilized Astoria apartment and doesn’t own a car, taking the subway to his debate appearances.

A quarter of a century after moving to the U.S., Mamdani’s net worth today is still based in the East African country from which he emigrated. According to the financial disclosures he filed as a state assemblyman in 2023, he acquired four acres of land in Jinja—a region of Uganda bordering Lake Victoria that contains the source of the Nile River—in 2012. He lists the land’s value as between $150,000 and $250,000. On the disclosure he filed as a mayoral candidate earlier this year, he says that he acquired the land in 2016 and that it remains vacant and unimproved. Whether he purchased it, was gifted it, inherited it or otherwise is unclear, as is the reason for the discrepancy in the date, and his campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

New York City disclosures don’t require candidates to list cash accounts, so there’s the possibility Mamdani’s worth a bit more than the documents show. Another caveat: he married his wife, a Syrian-born artist, earlier this year after the disclosures were due, so any assets she has may not show up until next year’s filings.

Meanwhile, his parents’ net worth is likely more significant. His father, who has written at least seven books, is still a professor at Columbia, where he specializes in colonialism and conflicts in Africa. Based on data for Columbia from the American Association of University Professors, he likely makes somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 a year.

The couple appear to still live in Columbia-owned housing on the Upper West Side; their three-bedroom apartment was listed for $6,000 rent in 2017, per StreetEasy. Nair used to own a condo in Chelsea, but sold it in 2019 for $1.45 million, barely more than the $1.4 million she paid for it in 2008.

If elected in November, Mamdani, at age 34, would be the youngest mayor since Hugh John Grant, who was inaugurated at 30 in 1889, and would get a raise to $260,000. Plus, he could save on rent by moving into Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence on the Upper East Side. Living there, he could continue the car-free lifestyle and take the subway to work—the Q train is only three blocks away.

With additional reporting by Lily Ogburn.