Jeff Bezos says he’s leaving Seattle for Miami
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon from his Seattle garage in 1994 and invested billions of dollars in transforming the city into a tech boomtown, said Thursday he would leave his home of three decades and move to Miami.
Mr Bezos, 59, announced his move in an Instagram post Thursday evening. He said his parents had recently returned to Miami, where he attended high school, and he wanted to be closer them and to his partner, Lauren Sanchez.
Another factor, he said, was that his rocket company Blue Origin’s operations are increasingly shifting to Cape Canaveral, Florida, just over 200 miles by road north of Miami along the state’s Atlantic coast.
Bloomberg News reported last month that Mr. Bezos had purchased a mansion in South Florida for $79 million, a few months after purchasing a neighboring home for $68 million. Mr. Bezos is worth $161 billion, making him the third richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.
Mr. Bezos said in his Instagram post that he had “great memories” of Seattle and had lived there longer than anywhere else. “As exciting as the move is, it is an emotional decision for me,” he wrote. “Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart.”
A short video which Mr. Bezos posted with his Instagram announcement shows him giving a tour of Amazon’s first office, a modest affair from his garage in Seattle. The room has a pair of giant white computers, a dry-erase board with writing on it, and a fax machine on top of a gray filing cabinet.
“See this big orange extension cord?” a young Mr. Bezos, in jeans and cheerful, says at one point to the cameraman, his father. “This is one of the devices we need because there isn’t enough power in this room. So we have to install some extra circuit breakers.”
“And that’s it,” he says at the end of the video, over the sound of a dog barking. “It doesn’t take long to reach the offices of Amazon-dot-com Inc. on view.”
It was not immediately clear late Thursday how Seattle or Miami residents felt about his move to Miami.