Not that Bill Gates cares, but he will soon regain his status as the richest person in Greater Seattle when Jeff Bezos makes a diagonal move across America to take up residence in Miami.
Currently, Bezos is the second wealthiest man in the United States, according to Fortune magazine, while Gates comes in at number six.
Bezos has lived in the Seattle area for 30 years, during which time he grew a modest online bookselling operation based in his garage into an international behemoth that dominates consumer sales of all kinds and makes some pretty good movies, too. Amazon now employs 65,000 people in the Puget Sound region split between a South Lake Union cluster of office buildings and another set of offices in Bellevue.
Miami is where Bezos went to high school and is the city to which his parents have returned. Bezos wants to be closer to Mom and Dad, he says. He also wants to get closer to his dream project, Blue Origin, the space rocket company that is headquartered in Kent, but builds and launches rockets at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Bezos has his detractors, but he is not nearly as controversial as America’s richest man, Elon Musk. While the mercurial Musk has undercut the image of his electric car company, Tesla, by buying Twitter, changing its name to X and opening the social media platform to right-wing rabble rousers, Bezos has exhibited a far different style and temperament as owner of The Washington Post. While president, Donald Trump threatened to punish Amazon if Bezos did not rein in the Post’s aggressive journalism. Bezos did not flinch. He told his editors and reporters to keep doing their jobs and he gave them the resources they needed to do them.
Bezos championed the Post’s motto, “Democracy dies in darkness,” a phrase that has become more pertinent with each passing year since it first went on the newspaper masthead in 2016.
I had a brief chat with Bezos when we bumped into each other by the bar at the Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, D.C., a few years ago. He was friendly and relaxed and left me with a good impression. He had no complaints about the various ways I have lampooned him in my cartoons. I suspect someone like Musk — and definitely Trump — would have thinner skin.
During his time in Seattle, Jeff Bezos built something big that has been a huge economic benefit for this city. Amazon’s founder may be changing his address, but Amazon is not going away.
Clarification: This column was updated. Martin Baron, former Washington Post editor, led the organization’s process that established “Democracy dies in darkness” as its motto.
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