Jeff Bezos says goodbye to Seattle. The third richest man in the world has announced that he is moving to live in Miami. The founder of Amazon leaves the city where he has spent most of his life and which he has helped transform with the creation of his e-commerce empire. He announced it himself through his Instagram account. Bezos this year bought two adjoining mansions on Indian Creek, an artificial island in Miami known as the billionaire bunker. He says he is moving there to be closer to his parents and the operations of Blue Origin, his space company.
“I’ve lived in Seattle longer than anywhere else and I have a lot of amazing memories here. As exciting as the move is, it is an emotional decision for me. Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart,” she wrote on the social network.
“Seattle has been my home since 1994, when I founded Amazon in the garage of my house,” also writes the businessman, who has illustrated the advertisement with a video shot by his father of a young Bezos in jeans in Amazon’s “first office” in 1994. “See this big orange extension cord? It’s one of the gadgets we have to have because there’s not enough power in this room. So we have to bring some extra circuit breakers,” he tells the camera. After a couple of takes, the video ends: “And, uh, that’s it. It doesn’t take long to tour the Amazon.com Inc offices.”
From that ramshackle, messy room where he started selling books online, Amazon has grown to become an empire with 1.5 million workers around the world. It is the absolute leader in electronic commerce, it has opened physical stores and diversified its business into other areas, among which cloud computing stands out. It has a turnover 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 position of Amazon’s chief executive to Andy Jassy in 2021. The company has made Bezos the third richest man in the world, with a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $161 billion (about $150 billion). euros), only behind Elon Musk (208 billion dollars) and very close to Bernard Arnault (163 billion). He rose to number one before divorcing his wife, McKenzie Scott, after 25 years of marriage. She kept 25% of the shareholding they had 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 former journalist Lauren Sanchez, gives about the move. “My parents have always been my greatest supporters. They recently moved back to Miami, where we lived when I was younger (Miami Palmetto High, Class of ’82, go Panthers!) I want to be close to my parents, and Lauren and I love Miami. Additionally, Blue Origin operations are increasingly moving to Cape Canaveral. Because of all that, I am planning to return to Miami, leaving the Pacific Northwest,” she notes.
Illustrious neighbors
His two mansions in Miami are on Indian Creek, an artificial island with 41 residences and a golf club on an area of 1.2 square kilometers. She paid 68 million dollars for the first and another 79 million for the second. Among his illustrious neighbors are the best American football player in history, Tom Brady, and businessmen Jared Kushner and Carl Icahn.
Beyond the millionaires’ bunker, Miami has become a pole of attraction for businessmen and celebrities, thanks in part to its low taxation. Technology entrepreneurs such as Keith Rabois, Peter Thiel, Jon Oringer and Bryan Goldburg and investment fund magnates such as 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 base for Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. In the biography of Elon Musk written by Walter Isaacson, the businessman criticized his lifestyle: “After Musk had sold all his houses and was living in rent in Texas, he also began to despise the luxurious lifestyle of Bezos, owner of multiple mansions. ‘In a way, I’m trying to provoke him to spend more time at Blue Origin so they can make more progress,’ says Musk. “He should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub,” the book says.
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