Amazon And The “Municipal Squid Game”

HQ2 is, will be, and probably always was a joke.

If you remember the Amazon “HQ2” push, basically Bezos — in his final days of running the e-commerce megasite — put out a call to all interested peasants, asking for reams of data about their cities and their infrastructure and all that. Many cities and counties bended the knee. I actually tangentially worked on (read: sat in two meetings related to) the Fort Worth proposal for Amazon HQ2, which I believe at one point was a partnership with Dallas. Hmm. Anyway, some crazy shit happened as cities were falling all over themselves to give tax incentives to a company founded by a guy whose yacht is changing bridge construction in The Netherlands. The Onion even parodied Albany (NY’s) bid.

In the end, the two sites “chosen” were:

• Arlington, VA
• NYC

Those sites have a few things in common:

• East coast
• Already sites of power around politics, technology, and finance
• Bezos owns homes in both
• Bezos also owns The Washington Post

This stuff happened before COVID. I think Bezos was already checked out of Amazon probably back in 2016 as his marriage probably began to smash the rocks, but…