A group of billionaires and business titans privately urged New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police on Columbia University protesters, according to The Washington Post.
The newspaper attributed its information to chat messages on WhatsApp. The Post claimed the business giants were working to shape public opinion of the war in Gaza.
A log of chat messages show the executives, including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik, and real estate investor Joseph Sitt, held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Adams about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia's campus.
Some attendees talked about making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group's members could push Columbia's president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, the Post reported.
A member of the chat group told the Post he donated $2,100, the maximum legal limit, to Adams that month.
During the chat group's session, some of the executives offered to pay for private investigators to aid New York police during the protests, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation, the newspaper said.
A member of the chat group reported that Adams accepted the offer.
But a City Hall spokeswoman said police are not using and have not used private investors to help in handling the protesters.
The Post said the messages detailing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in on the app among business leaders and financiers, including former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother of Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump's son-in-law.
The chat was started by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, the newspaper said. But Sternlicht never joined directly. He communicated through the staffer, according to chat messages and a person close to Sternlicht.
In an Oct. 12 message the staffer, posting on behalf of Sternlicht, told the others the goal of the group was to "change the narrative" in favor of Israel, partly by conveying "the atrocities committed by Hamas … to all Americans."
The Post said the messages show how some prominent people have used their money and power in an effort to shape American views of the war in Gaza.
It also reveals how they shaped the actions of academic, business, and political leaders — including New York's mayor, the newspaper said.
But Fabien Levy, a New York City deputy mayor, attacked the report in a post on X, saying it used antisemitic tropes by suggesting Jewish billionaires were using their money to influence elected officials.
"The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that The Washington Post should have been ashamed to ask about, let alone actually publish," he wrote. "The story is even more offensive than initially described to us."