Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

Back in Seattle, Kshama Sawant and the leftward-careening city council had again proposed a head tax—dubbed the Employee Hours Tax—that would charge large employers up to $500 per employee and raise up to $86 million to counter problems like homelessness and the lack of affordable housing. It was a draconian measure: by comparison, Chicago had a measly $4 per employee head tax for nearly thirty years before mayor Rahm Emanuel demonstrated that it was responsible for jobs losses and convinced the city council to phase it out. Under the proposal, raised in April 2018, Amazon’s local tax bill would increase by an additional $22.5 million annually, on top of the $250 million in state and local taxes it paid. That would be a fraction of Amazon’s $10 billion profit in 2018, but it was the antagonistic thought that counted. Seattle was moving to double-tax both corporate income and headcount, a situation necessitated in part because Washington is one of seven states with no personal income tax (a fact that had neatly benefited Bezos and other Amazon execs over the years). Amazon believed the company already paid plenty in municipal taxes, and if the city wasn’t spending its money in the right ways and to address the most pressing problems, that was hardly their fault. After the head-tax proposal, Bezos contacted John Schoettler and ordered the real estate division to stop construction on “Block 18,” a seventeen-story tower near Day 1, and to sublease most of the 800,000-square-fo...