On November 1, 2023, Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos announces in an Instagram post that he is leaving Seattle after nearly 30 years and moving to Miami. No stranger to the Sunshine State, the billionaire and tech entrepreneur spent his teenage years there where he worked at a McDonald’s and graduated as class valedictorian in 1982 from Miami Palmetto High School. Bezos says he wants to be closer to his parents, who recently moved to Florida. Also, Miami is more convenient for his frequent trips to Cape Canaveral, a prime launch site for Blue Origin, the aerospace technology company founded by Bezos in 2000. At the time of the announcement, Bezos is believed to be the second-wealthiest man in the U.S. and the third-richest in the world with a net worth of $161 billion.
“A Piece of My Heart”
An Instagram post written by Jeff Bezos (b. 1964) created a frenzy of media attention when it appeared on November 1, 2023: Bezos was leaving Seattle to move to Miami. The post included a 1994 video tour of Amazon’s first office, a garage attached to a three-bedroom Craftsman-style house in Bellevue, where Bezos was living at the time. His father shot the original hand-held footage. In the video, Bezos points out several computers, a dry-erase board covered with notes, and a fax machine sitting on a filing cabinet. At the end of the footage, a youthful Bezos proclaims, “And, uh, that’s about it … It doesn’t take long to tour the offices of Amazon-dot-com Inc.” (Mike Ives).
Noting it was both an exciting move and an emotional one, Bezos wrote that he wanted to be closer to his parents, Jacqueline and Miguel Bezos, who had recently relocated to Florida. In noting the bittersweet nature of the announcement, Bezos said: “I’ve lived in Seattle longer than I’ve lived anywhere else and have so many amazing memories here … Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart” (“Jeff Bezos is Leaving …”).
Bezos’s career path took a few turns before he arrived in Seattle in 1994. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1986 with a bachelor of science in engineering and went to work at several Wall Street investment firms. Inspired by the explosive growth of the internet, he left New York and moved to Seattle, a region already home to Microsoft. There he began a start-up business as an online bookstore; “Amazon” was his third choice for a company name. After launching a beta version of his e-tail site, Bezos moved the business into the SODO neighborhood south of downtown Seattle. Amazon.com officially launched on July 16, 1995. By its second year, the company had 11 employees, and within six years, it had grown to 9,000 workers.
At the time he announced the Florida move, Amazon employed about 65,000 workers at campuses in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood and Bellevue. Worldwide, Amazon employees numbered about 1.5 million by the end of 2023. Two years earlier, in 2021, Bezos had stepped down as CEO, turning the company over to Andy Jassy (b. 1968), the former head of Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division. Although Bezos retained the title of executive chair, he devoted much of his time to overseeing his two other interests: Blue Origin, a space travel company, and the Washington Post.
An Outsized Corporate Footprint
Although Amazon has plenty of critics, there is no denying that the company had significant impact on Seattle. “As Amazon grew over the years into a colossus of internet commerce, becoming the world’s largest retail seller outside China in 2021, it poured billions of dollars into Seattle’s economy and helped to reshape its global reputation. But Amazon has faced pushback from workers and regulators over its labor practices and corporate tactics. And Mr. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post and the world’s largest sailing yacht, among other things, has plenty of detractors in Seattle and beyond” (Mike Ives).
The dramatic economic and job-creation growth engendered by the company’s success had its downside in an affordable-housing crisis and transportation headaches. Bezos tried to ameliorate some of these issues through numerous charitable donations. In 2018, he created the Bezos Fund, allocating $2 billion to preschools, low-income communities, and nonprofit organizations such as Mary’s Place, which provides shelter and outreach for homeless women, children, and families. The environment was also one his favorite causes. “Some of Bezos’ most benevolent pledges have been toward combatting climate change. Amazon secured the naming rights to the former Key Arena, but rather than slapping the company’s logo atop the famous roof, Bezos saw it as an opportunity. Climate Pledge Arena, the home of the Seattle Kraken, brands the facility’s sustainability efforts” (“Seattle’s Frenemy”). The arena naming rights were estimated to cost the company between $300 million and $400 million.
There was speculation that Bezos’s decision to relocate was a result of Washington’s new capital-gains tax and a wealth-tax proposal. Florida had neither. Just months before he made his announcement, in March 2023, Washington’s Supreme Court upheld a controversial capital-gains tax after years of legal appeals that would levy a 7 percent tax on financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. Neither state has a state income tax.
Properties Here and There
Before the relocation announcement, Bezos had purchased two homes in the Miami area. One was a waterfront mansion in Indian Creek, a barrier island near the greater Miami area, for which he paid $68 million in August 2023. In October of that year, he purchased the mansion next door for $79 million. Around the same time, In November 2023, Amazon began looking to lease 50,000 square feet of office space in Miami where the company employed 400 workers. However, an Amazon spokesperson noted that the office-space search was already in the works before Bezos announced his relocation plans. “Rather than being connected to Bezos’s move, the search is driven by Amazon’s ‘organic growth’ in the area, the spokesperson said” (“Is Amazon Following …”).
Also at this time, Bezos listed his property at Yarrow Point on the east side of Lake Washington for $4.4 million. The home, built in 2018, had five bedrooms and 4,300-square feet of space; it sold for $4.2 million in January 2024. The Yarrow Point home is just one of the estimated $190 million worth of Washington real estate owned by the billionaire.
In addition to moving closer to family, Bezos welcomed the opportunity to be closer to Cape Canaveral, a space hub just over 200 miles north of Miami. The aerospace manufacturing company, Blue Origin, which Bezos had launched in 2000 in Kent, had been increasingly shifting its focus to Florida. Earlier that year, in May 2023, Blue Origin won a $3.4 billion contract from NASA to develop a lunar-landing system. The project would help support the Artemis program, which is working to develop a spacecraft to transport people from Earth to the moon. Blue Origin had previously lost out on an earlier NASA contract that had gone to another privately owned space travel company, SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk.
Sources:
HistoryLink Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, “Amazon: The Early Years (1995-1999)” (by Jennie Cecil Moore) www.historylink.org (accessed November 1, 2025); “Jeff Bezos is Leaving Seattle, Moving to Miami,” The Seattle Times, November 2, 2023, Section: Business (seattletimes.com); Lauren Rosenblatt, “What Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos’ Move from Seattle Has to do with Taxes,” Ibid., November 3, 2023, Section: Business; Lauren Rosenblatt, “Bezos’ Plan to Move Sparks Speculation about His Motives,” Ibid., November 4, 2023, p. A-1; Lauren Rosenblatt, “Is Amazon Following Jeff Bezos to Miami? Not Exactly,” Ibid., November 28, 2023, Section: Business; “Jeff Bezos to Sell a Seattle-Area Property,” Ibid., December 8, 2023, p. A-16; Alex Halverson, “Seattle’s Frenemy,” Puget Sound Business Journal, July 2, 2021; Alex Halverson, “NASA Taps Blue Origin for Moon Landing Mission,” Ibid., May 19, 2023; Alex Halverson, “Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos to Leave Seattle for Miami,” Ibid., November 2, 2023; J. C. Carnahan and Marissa Nall, “Blue Origin Launches New Glenn Rocket to Orbit,” Ibid., January 16, 2025 (www.bizjournals.com/seattle); Mike Ives, “Bezos to Move to Miami Area from Seattle,” The New York Times, November 4, 2023, p. B-4.
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