Francis Suarez is proud that an adopted Miamian, FIFA chief Gianni Infantino, can be talking on the upcoming America Business Forum—as will Infantino’s new chum, President Donald Trump. Suarez, who briefly ran a Republican presidential campaign in 2023, hailed Trump in feedback to Fortune, calling the president “some of the consequential political and enterprise leaders of our time,” including that his perspective on management, world enterprise, and America’s function on the earth “can be a defining a part of this 12 months’s Discussion board. We’re honored to welcome him to Miami.” Suarez additionally informed Fortune that he’s proud Miami is internet hosting the second-most World Cup video games subsequent summer time, together with the bronze medal sport.
After practically eight years in workplace, the outgoing mayor is happy with realizing his ambitions to make Miami the “capital of capital,” arguing in an interview with Fortune that it’s “graduated from the capital of Latin America to a very nice world metropolis.” And Suarez has a whole lot of phrases for the doubtless subsequent mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, together with Mamdani’s marketing campaign to pressure FIFA to alter its ticket pricing technique.
“That is form of authorities overreach, proper?” Suarez mentioned. Whereas providing a major caveat, noting he isn’t overly conversant in the specifics of Mamdani’s marketing campaign, which accuses FIFA of “price gouging” and urges it to put aside 15% of tickets at discounted charges for working-class New Yorkers, Suarez pivoted to dialogue of housing coverage. “You see this within the context of lease controls or value controls,” he mentioned, the primary of many broadsides he aimed toward what he sees occurring in New York Metropolis politics. “They appear good within the brief run, prefer it makes you are feeling good, proper? Like, hey, we’re going to regulate costs.”
For his half, Mamdani has framed the problem as one space the place authorities ought to attempt to intervene. “Are any working-class New Yorkers really going to have the ability to watch any of the matches?” he has asked publicly, accusing FIFA of “pricing working individuals out of the sport that they love” and urging different cities to affix his battle in opposition to what he described as unchecked greed, as seen within the title of his marketing campaign, “Game over Greed.”
Mamdani claims FIFA’s dynamic pricing model amounts to “price gouging” as tickets for the 2026 FIFA World Cup—hosted across 16 cities, with eight matches and the final at MetLife Stadium—will vary from $60 as much as $6,730, with costs adjusting to demand. In his petition, Mamdani referred to as for caps on resale costs much like laws lately adopted in fellow host nation Mexico, situating the combat inside a broader motion to guard working individuals from rising prices.
Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment from Fortune. But JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon sat down with Fortune earlier in October on the Most Powerful Women summit in Washington DC, and provided some ideas on how the enterprise class is relating to Mamdani, weeks out of the mayoral election. Dimon mentioned that if Mamdani is elected, he’ll supply his assist. Calling Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist motion “actually extra Marxist than socialist,” Dimon alluded to studies of conversations between the 2 males and Mamdani’s broadly reported appeal offensive with New York’s enterprise class. Mamdani is “speaking to lots of people, he’s satisfied lots of people [that] he’s going to alter [and] he needs to be taught.”
Open for enterprise
As for Suarez, the popular two-term Republican mayor has lengthy insisted on authorities being open for enterprise and small in scope. “When authorities intervenes,” Suarez informed Fortune, “oftentimes the result’s disaster, it’s chaos.” He mentioned he sees Miami, alternatively, as “a metropolis the place a rising tide lifts all boats,” noting its exceptionally low unemployment (2.9% as of August) and excessive median wage progress (Asana found it was the best within the nation from 2020 to 2023, outpacing inflation).
Suarez informed Fortune he thinks he’s been a profitable mayor due to deliberate coverage decisions that targeted authorities on slender quality-of-life points, a business-friendly perspective, and putting whereas the iron was scorching. He reminded Fortune that it began with a viral tweet back in December 2020, when he took the concept of reworking South Seaside into Silicon Valley critically. It was far behind his objective coming in, when he merely wished to assist Miami transition away from an industrial economic system. That tweet helped him understand, he mentioned, “that there was an inflection level that may enable us to hyperscale.” He mentioned he was a possibility to squeeze 30 years’ price of progress into simply three or 4, and that he’d be proud to be remembered as a social-media mayor.
Suarez mentioned he was cautious of Mamdani. “My mother and father got here from a rustic [in Cuba] the place ayounger, charismatic chief made the identical guarantees. And he did create equality: He created equality of distress, struggling, poverty.”
Nonetheless, Suarez and Mamdani have some issues in widespread, particularly their telegenic, social-media savvy rises to fame, albeit from opposing political poles. When this dynamic is identified, particularly the central function of social media of their campaigning, Suarez says he “thinks that’s true,” whereas rapidly clarifying that “anyone who’s younger, presumably, goes to be good on social media, proper?” Suarez would slightly speak about what he sees Mamdani in the end promoting to doubtless voters: “Are you promoting a future that’s going to make issues higher, or are you promoting a highway to perdition? And I believe he’s promoting a highway to perdition, whether or not he’s doing it deliberately or not, whether or not he really believes that he could make issues higher. I don’t know. I don’t know him personally.”
Suarez is raring to reel off the highest names he’s recruited to Miami, whether or not it’s billionaires, celebrities, or main employers. He notes that in addition to Infantino, town has attracted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Corridor of Fame quarterback Tom Brady, soccer celebrity Lionel Messi, and hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. “These are individuals that would stay wherever on the earth and have chosen to stay in Miami.” Suarez notes that he’s an anomaly as the primary native-born Miami mayor, and Miami is understood for being made up of adopted Miamians.
The mayor additionally listed Miami’s main lights in enterprise, with corporations equivalent to BlackRock, Blackstone, and Citadel all opening native places of work and even headquarters domestically. “We’ve attracted corporations that handle near $13 trillion in belongings,” he mentioned, and it’s including notable conferences together with points of interest like Formula One and the new Inter Miami soccer stadium. This has all put stress on Miami’s infrastructure, Suarez acknowledged, saying Miami is in some methods a sufferer of its objective to grow to be “Wall Street South.” He mentioned there’s “undoubtedly a gentrification occurring in Miami,” and it has gotten costly.
Actually, UBS World Wealth Administration’s annual Real Estate Bubble Index, revealed in late September, put Miami on the very prime spot of its world “bubble danger index,” backing Suarez’s argument that it’s actually a world metropolis after explosive progress beneath his tenure. The closest American cities to Miami on UBS’ record have been Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, respectively. The Swiss financial institution famous that Miami’s bubble danger had really decreased since 2024 and over the previous 5 years, Miami and the equally sunny and rich Dubai have led the pack, averaging actual value progress of roughly 50%.
Amongst all of the bubbly real-estate markets, UBS discovered Miami posting the strongest inflation-adjusted housing appreciation over the previous 15 years. Affordability remains to be close to file lows, however housing stock has rebounded to close pre-pandemic ranges as of 2025. “Miami’s coastal attraction and favorable tax setting proceed to draw newcomers from the U.S. West and Northeast,” the report famous, with worldwide demand remaining strong, significantly from Latin America.
Suarez blames too many New Yorkers transferring in for the inflated real-estate costs. “When individuals are available, it does put stress on our value affordability. We was much more reasonably priced than New York, till all of the New Yorkers got here and now we’re shut in value.” He mentioned he sees this persevering with beneath the doubtless mayorship of Mamdani. “The sense that I’ve … as rates of interest go down, plus individuals fleeing New York, there can be one other wave. You’re feeling it, you sense it, it’s going to have a 20%, 30% impression on values.”
Suburban New York realtors say they’re seeing a “Mamdani effect” of extra reasonable and conservative New Yorkers fleeing forward of Mamdani’s election, with residence gross sales in contract spiking 15% year-over-year per one native agency. Inside the metropolis, Alexander Carter, a licensed real-estate salesperson with the Corcoran Group, beforehand informed Fortune that she had “by no means seen this kind of response to a mayor,” having labored in actual property for 3 or 4 totally different tenures. “It’s been fairly drastic. After he gained the first we had a companywide name on implications for enterprise due to the ‘lease freezes.’” She mentioned the Mamdani impact comes down to at least one factor: “Individuals are afraid it will likely be unhealthy for enterprise.”
Suarez insists that he doesn’t need Miami to succeed whereas New York is failing. “I believe you need each nice American metropolis to succeed.” New York Metropolis, by the best way, is the one metro space that may host extra World Cup video games than Miami—all of them throughout the river, in close by New Jersey. Though, President Trump has recently hinted that he’ll seek to strip World Cup games from cities that he doesn’t like. Miami certainly wouldn’t be a type of.
