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Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says (wsj.com)
Amazon plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, WSJ reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities. From the report: The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company's headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company's plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems. [...] The report, published Monday, did not specify the locations Amazon is exploring, but on Sunday, the newspaper had reported that the ecommerce giant was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City. [The aforementioned link may be paywalled; here's an alternative source.]
when you can have two? It's double the incentives.
They would have included that important information. The great thing about summarizing a story is that it is often difficult to come up with information that the source article does not have.
I still don't understand how multiple headquarters is supposed to work. The purpose of a headquarters is to have a place to get ideas in front of the decision maker. Is Bezos going to spend a week each month at each location?
If he isn't there, it isn't really headquarters. It sounds to me like a giant grift for taxpayer money.
I've seen similar stunts in the past.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems."
They're concerned about housing for tens of thousands of workers and they're considering New York City as one of the options? I haven't lived there myself, but from everything i've heard decent, reasonably priced housing is not something that can be found in New York City.
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They are turning in to the same type of defense contractor company. They setup a part of the business in multiple states. The get huge contracts and handouts from the government, states, cities, etc. If the incentives will never dissappear because no senator wants to be responsible for the vote that made amazon leave the area, taking 20k jobs with it. It's the same thing defense contractors do. 18 billion dollar contracts keep flowing into them, and they split the work between multiple state locations. That ensures no senator will vote against the contract, because if they do, the project shuts down, so do the plants, and that state loses the multiple thousands of jobs.
Same formula, different company.