DoorDash spent $1.4 million to beat Mamdani. He just made them pay their drivers nearly 100 times that.
Its CEO tells business owners to run "the greedy algorithm." The company's own statement Tuesday: "Simply put, we screwed up."
On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani announced the largest worker settlement in New York City history. DoorDash will pay $131.5 million, and $115 million of it goes straight to the 264,000 delivery workers it shorted over four years.
Those are the riders on e-bikes, most of them immigrants, who carry the city's dinner through the rain. Nobody has to file a claim. The city already knows who's owed what. The emails go out in late October, and every dollar the company held back comes back doubled, up to $5,000 a rider. For the next three years DoorDash has to hand the city its pay records every month.
The case started with dozens of riders telling the city they'd been paid late or not at all. Investigators went through 152 million payments and found the company had left hours off the clock: canceled trips, runs that crossed the city line, all time the city's minimum pay law says a rider gets paid for. The city found DoorDash "deliberately" paid below the minimum. Mamdani called it "not an accidental rounding error or a mistake."
DoorDash, in its statement:
"Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren't intentional, that doesn't make them okay."
Mamdani, at the podium:
"Two months ago, Tony Xu, the CEO of DoorDash, gave business owners a piece of advice. A CEO, he said, has to take the greedy algorithm and keep going all the way to see if there is more. In computer science, a greedy algorithm is one that makes the most optimized, best short-term outcome choice at every step and never weighs the consequences. New York City and the tens of thousands of delivery workers who call our city home have reckoned with greed as a business model for far too long."
In May 2025, with Mamdani surging in the primary, DoorDash wrote a $1 million check to Fix the City, the super PAC that spent $31 million to stop him. It was the biggest donation in the race at the time. The ads called him "a risk New York can't afford."
One mailer digitally lengthened and darkened his beard. The fine print at the end of the TV spots read: "The top three donors to the organization responsible for this advertisement are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, John Hess." All in, The Intercept counts about $1.4 million from DoorDash against him.
He had promised on the trail to go after the delivery apps. Two weeks after he was sworn in, his administration put them on notice. Ligia Guallpa, whose group helped riders file the first complaints: "DoorDash decided to invest money in trying to buy our city's democracy."
Mamdani: "When a worker earns a wage, they deserve to be paid that wage — not tomorrow, not after a lawsuit, but on time and in full."
DoorDash's ads called Mamdani "a risk New York can't afford."
New York could afford him. DoorDash couldn't.
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