Strange I've never seen a businessman pose for a picture like a splayed out Playmate.

Novelty mugs like this usually don't contain this character (寿) alone, in my experience. I would suspect a second character next to it, although the cup is turned in such a way I can't see anything. Being a novelty-type of cup, I would suspect it says "sushi".

FWIW:

1. This whole pic looks photoshopped and overall it's weird on so many levels. (The placement of his body and the shadows on the floor don't jive to me -- it looks unnatural). It all looks... hasty. Like someone decent with PS cobbled together a bunch of random objects and put it in a room.

2. The character (寿) does mean various things, such as 'longevity', 'congratulations', and 'best wishes' among others. It's pronounced kotobiki when why itself, although it's pronounced differently depending it's usage (grammatically and when combined with other characters). This could be entirely innocent, as this is a picture of Khan's new role as NYT exec director. A "best wishes" to the new director kind of thing.

3. However, Joe Khan was a journalist in China. Kinda obscure, but the character on the cup can be seen in the name for a Chinese peach (寿星桃・じゅせいとう・jyuseitou）-- which could be an allusion to him being a homosexual -- but as far as I know there's no proof of that. It's a weird coincidence, as far as I know.

[Edit: 4. It might be worth asking those more familiar with Chinese if there's anything about this character that's interesting or sus to them, seeing as that's part of Khan's background.]

Everything about this image screams photoshop. He looks like he was photoshopped into the scene. The scene itself looks like a composite. The corner table is just awful, the whole photo has horrible composition and mismatched lighting. And don't even get me started on this pose.

It also looks like it was photoshopped onto a blank mug later. So this is comms of some kind to someone.

Notice the character does not follow the round shape of the cup - it's not really printed on there IRL.

Very ghey IMO

This is one of the creepiest pictures I have ever seen, ever

Looks like this: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+5BFF

Meaning: 1) old age, long life; lifespan 2) congratulations

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AF%BF

Eww.

Another thought about Mr. Kahn:

He knows Mandarin and Chinese culture, and I would think that would be very useful to know in this current time when many are expecting China to become the top visible world power (as opposed to the invisible).

Strangely, he refers to his wife, maiden name of Wu, as his "most important partner," but has some males he has worked with whom he also refers to as "partners." There is some hint here and elsewhere of sexual ambiguity.

This person put into the top editing spot at the NYT seems to be a very significant placement.

The Chinese kanji cup seems to say several things:

China is the future, get used to it.

I'm top dog now, congratulations to me.

I'm planning to be top dog at the paper for a long time, so get used to it.

Any other ideas?

The Kanji cup makes another appearance in the piece about him. I have to say, after reading the article, the message he is probably trying to send is that he expects to have "longevity" in the Times editor position.

Abe Rosenthal, the totemic New York Times editor who published the Pentagon Papers, used to say that there was one path to the executive editor’s office — over the dead, burned, and maimed bodies of the ten other people who wanted the job. So I turned to Joseph Kahn, the new top dog at the Times, and asked whom he incinerated to get here.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, suppressing a sly smile. It was late last Friday afternoon — just days before it would be announced that he had ascended to journalism’s Iron Throne — and we were sitting in a conference room high above the empty newsroom. “The truth is that we’re in a bit of a different era, and some of the transitions in the past admittedly have been rocky, and there have been more abrupt changes in leadership. I think we’re going to have a really smooth change in leadership.”

Rocky? There have been four executive editors of the Times in the past two decades, and two of them — Howell Raines (2001 to 2003) and Jill Abramson (2011 to 2014) — lasted under three years, self-destructing spectacularly in public after losing the faith of the Sulzberger family. Was Kahn nervous? “I am nervous,” he told me, “for a variety of reasons. Not really because I think that I’m going to self-destruct but because it’s an enormous responsibility to manage a newsroom of this size and ambition at this particular moment in history.”

From: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/joe-kahn-new-york-times-profile.html

The kanji is meant to be Chinese:

While in China, Kahn met Shannon Wu, who he would later marry. In our hourlong interview, he came alive most while talking about her. “I can’t say enough,” he said, sitting up a little straighter. “Shannon has been my partner since 2007. We met when I was stationed in Beijing back in 2002. We weren’t immediately a couple; we were friends for a number of years. She actually left China while I was there and worked at the World Bank in Washington. So while I was living in her home, she was living kind of back in mine. We did stay in touch, though, and at some point, a couple years later, we got together and were married in 2007. And our older son was born in 2008, so, you know, she’s been my most important partner ever since.” (The couple has two sons.)

What’s with his left foot? Looks like he’s wearing socks at first glance and yet… a hoof?! Wtf?!

It seems the big taboo problem with the Left is their lack of longevity in service to the cabal. Hidey/Hoe is most notable for their support being short-lived. This fellow seems to want to send a message that he is about lasting in the position, which is just as much wishful thinking as the rainbow flag agenda generally.

Longevity

FWIW, it looks like half of the symbol usually used for "sushi"

Unagi

It is translingual - in Japanese, Chinese, and Han specifically it means "long life, longevity," and also "congratulations" in Kanji. Longevity in Kanji