Commentary
Successful capitalists who finance efforts opposing capitalism are as curious a phenomenon as anti-American beneficiaries of America, with the former pretty much always a subgroup of the latter.
Who makes a better national poster boy for market success than Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon.com 30 years ago out of his rented garage in Washington state to sell books online and grew it into an international powerhouse with assets exceeding a half-trillion dollars that is, certainly for most Americans, the go-to website for purchasing almost anything?
Within two decades of launching Amazon, this Princeton grad now worth $200 billion would purchase The Washington Post, the nation’s capital’s most powerful liberal organ—possibly saving it from becoming a casualty of the internet—and not long thereafter start a private spaceflight firm, Blue Origin, that would take Mr. Bezos himself into suborbit in 2021. His geeky, cutthroat approach to management, allegedly notorious verbal abusiveness toward employees, and demands for quick hyper-growth are for many the epitome of 21st-century techno-entrepreneurship—even a modern Gordon “greed is good” Gekko from the anti-Wall Street movie “Wall Street.”
Mr. Bezos’s political interests, by comparison, tilt sharply left, but are also oddly schizophrenic. He has donated to some of the most radical members of Congress, such as the late Michigan Democrat John Conyers and Vermont Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy, and has heavily funded the same-sex marriage movement, yet he also put lots of money behind efforts to prevent a targeted income tax from being imposed on the rich residing in the Evergreen State.
But to where is this living symbol, along with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, of the Northwestern United States’ technological dominance and hip politics currently in the process of relocating? From trendy Seattle to square, kitchy Florida.
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Mr. Bezos just put down $90 million on what will be his third mansion on Indian Creek Island near Miami, a locale nicknamed the “Billionaire Bunker,” bringing his total real estate purchases there to a reported $237 million. One of his neighbors will be living legend NFL quarterback Tom Brady.
Last year, he announced on Instagram that he would be making his legal residence there to be close to his parents and because “Blue Origin’s operations are increasingly shifting to Cape Canaveral.” But are those the primary reasons, or is he making the move because a 7 percent capital gains tax on amounts exceeding $250,000 in Washington state is being implemented, on top of the state’s existing estate tax of as high as 20 percent, plus a possible 1 percent tax on assets such as equities and bonds?
His new home state boasts no estate tax, no capital gains tax, no state income tax, no payroll taxes, and a 5.5 percent corporate tax rate, with more than two dozen large corporations picking up and leaving California for Florida in recent years. Consumer finance firm WalletHub two years ago issued a report ranking Miami, plus Jacksonville, Orlando, and Tampa, in the top 10 American cities for starting a business.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, until recently former President Donald Trump’s rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has pointed out the following: “Florida now has millions more residents than New York, yet New York’s budget is twice the size of Florida’s. They have a $4.3 billion budget deficit. Florida now has more manufacturing jobs than New York, and added twice as many jobs as New York in the past year, and our unemployment rate is 1.4 percentage points lower. It is not surprising that we have witnessed—and continue to witness—a great migration of Americans away from cities and states pursuing these failed policies, with Florida serving as a refuge for freedom and sanity.”
Similar to Mr. Bezos, in 2022, Elon Musk uprooted both himself and his electric auto company Tesla from California to zero-state-income-tax Texas, but Mr. Musk’s politics are far more in sync with the tax-cutting Republicans than the Amazon founder’s. Mr. DeSantis said that Florida has “set the standard for limited government” with “the fewest state employees per capita and the lowest state government cost per capita” plus “the lowest unemployment rate of all large states.”
Mr. Bezos might also want to mull his new home state’s Digital Bill of Rights that Mr. DeSantis signed and which will take effect this summer. Among its provisions are keeping Big Tech companies such as Amazon from collecting personal information or tracking the movements of users via fingerprints and voice and eye signatures, and requiring the companies to disclose whether the search results they provide adhere to political or ideological criteria. The law also forbids state government coordination with the tech giants on censoring or regulating free speech.
It makes perfect sense for a self-made centibillionaire dedicated to innovation such as Jeff Bezos to move to Mr. DeSantis’s famously business-friendly Sunshine State; what makes no sense is his continued support for the enemies of the policies that may have convinced him to relocate 3,300 miles across the country to benefit from them.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
