Jeff Bezos says goodbye to Seattle. The third richest man in the world has announced he is moving to Miami. The founder of Amazon is leaving the city where he spent most of his life and which he helped shape by founding his e-commerce empire. He announced it himself via his Instagram account. This year, Bezos bought two adjacent villas on Indian Creek, a man-made island in Miami known as the billionaire bunker. He says he’s moving there to be closer to his parents and the operations of his space company, Blue Origin.
“I have lived in Seattle longer than anywhere else and have many great memories here. As exciting as the move is, for me it is an emotional decision. “Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart,” he wrote on the social network.
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“Seattle has been my home since 1994, when I founded Amazon in the garage of my house,” also writes the businessman, who illustrated the announcement with a video shot by his father of a young Bezos in jeans in the “first office” of Amazon in 1994 . “See that big orange extension cord? It is one of the devices we need because there is not enough electricity in this room. “That’s why we have to bring a few extra circuit breakers,” he says into the camera. After a few takes the video ends: “And, uh, that’s it. It doesn’t take long to tour the Amazon.com Inc. offices.”
From that run-down, messy space where it began selling books online, Amazon has grown into an empire with 1.5 million workers around the world. It is the absolute leader in electronic commerce, has opened physical stores and expanded its business into other areas, among which cloud computing stands out. It has sales of more than $500 billion in 2022 and is worth $1.4 trillion on the stock market.
The 59-year-old businessman handed over the post of Amazon boss to Andy Jassy in 2021. The company made Bezos the third richest man in the world, with a fortune that Bloomberg estimates at $161 billion (around $150 billion), behind only Elon Musk ($208 billion) and very close to Bernard Arnault (163rd). billion). He rose to number one before divorcing his wife McKenzie Scott after 25 years of marriage. She retained 25% of her shares in the company. The businessman retained 75%, plus the Washington Post and the space company Blue Origin.
The proximity to his parents and the launch base in Cape Canaveral (Florida), just over 300 kilometers from Miami, are the explanations that Bezos, whose current partner is the former journalist Lauren Sanchez, gives for the move. “My parents have always been my biggest supporters. They recently moved back to Miami, where we lived when I was younger (Miami Palmetto High, class of 1982, go to the Panthers!). I want to be close to my parents and Lauren and I love Miami. Additionally, Blue Origin’s operations are increasingly moving to Cape Canaveral. Still, I plan to return to Miami and leave the Pacific Northwest,” he says.
Famous neighbors
His two Miami villas are located on Indian Creek, an artificial island with 41 residences and a golf club covering 1.2 square kilometers. He paid $68 million for the first and another $79 million for the second. His famous neighbors include the best American football player in history, Tom Brady, and businessmen Jared Kushner and Carl Icahn.
Beyond the millionaire’s bunker, Miami has become a magnet for business people and celebrities, thanks in part to its low taxation. Tech entrepreneurs like Keith Rabois, Peter Thiel, Jon Oringer and Bryan Goldburg, as well as investment fund magnates like Ken Griffin, Dan Loeb and Josh Harris, have moved there.
Bezos also has homes in Washington, DC, New York, Los Angeles and Maui, as well as a ranch in Texas, the launch site for Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. In the biography of Elon Musk written by Walter Isaacson, the businessman criticized his lifestyle: “After selling all his houses and living in Texas as a renter, Musk also began to despise the luxurious lifestyle of Bezos, the owner of several mansions.” “In a way, I’m trying to provoke him to spend more time at Blue Origin so they can make more progress,” Musk says. “You should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub,” the book says.