The competition to snag Amazon’s second headquarters and the estimated 50,000 jobs that go with it has 20 finalist cities desperately claiming any advantage they can.
Washington, D.C., can boast of its convenience to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post since 2013. The Texan contenders — Dallas and Austin — can point to Bezos’ roots in the state where he grew up and remains a major landowner. And New York can claim to be the home to Bezos’ first career successes.
Chicago, by contrast, has only tenuous claims on the personal affections of the man ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person. As a young finance whiz, Bezos ran Wall Street firm D.E. Shaw & Co.’s Chicago-based options business remotely, from New York.
