Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in his Seattle garage in 1994 and invested billions of dollars to transform the city into a tech boomtown, said Thursday that he would leave his home of three decades and move to Miami.
Mr Bezos, 59, announced his move in an Instagram post on Thursday evening. He said his parents recently returned to Miami, where he attended high school, and he wanted to be closer to them and his partner, Lauren Sanchez.
Another factor, he said, is that the operations of his rocket company Blue Origin are increasingly moving to Cape Canaveral, Florida, just over 200 road miles north of Miami along the state’s Atlantic coast.
Bloomberg News reported last month that Mr. Bezos had bought a mansion in South Florida for $79 million, just months after he bought a neighboring mansion for $68 million. According to Bloomberg, Mr. Bezos is worth $161 billion, making him the third richest person in the world.
Mr Bezos said in his Instagram post that he had “amazing 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 that Mr. Bezos posted along with his Instagram announcement shows him touring Amazon’s first office, a modest office in his garage in Seattle. The room features a few giant white computers, a dry-erase board covered in writing, and a fax machine sitting on a gray filing cabinet.
“Do you see that big orange extension cable?” says a young Mr. Bezos, in jeans and in a good mood, to the cameraman, his father. “This is one of the devices we need because there is not enough electricity in this room. That’s why we need to install some additional circuit breakers.”
“And, uh, that’s about it,” he says at the end of the video, over the sound of a dog barking. “It doesn’t take long to tour the offices of Amazon-dot-com Inc.”
It was not immediately clear late Thursday how people in Seattle or Miami felt about his move.
As Amazon grew into an internet commerce colossus over the years, becoming the world’s largest retail seller outside of China in 2021, the company invested billions of dollars in Seattle’s economy and helped reshape its global reputation.