'Amazon's HQ2 Was a Con, Not a Contest'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: To dozens of cities across the United States, Amazon's widely publicized search for a 'second headquarters' looked like thousands of new jobs, up for grabs. To Pivot co-host Scott Galloway, it now looks like a 'ruse.' 'I lease office space all the time for my businesses and I always tell my real estate agent, 'We can lease any office in the world as long as I can walk there from where I live,'' Galloway said on the latest episode. 'Amazon is now talking about having three headquarters, Seattle, Crystal City and Long Island City. The Bezos's also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles.

'This was never a contest,' he added. 'It was a con meant to induce ridiculous terms that they then took to the cites all along that they knew they were going to be in.' In other words: By soliciting bids from lots of place where it was never going to move, Galloway alleges, Amazon was probably able to get more tax breaks from the pre-determined 'winners.' 'I would bet, Kara, that when they pick two cities and they went to 2 and 3, they didn't say, 'Well, only half our headquarters is going there, so we're going to let you cut the tax subsidies and incentives in half,'' he explained. 'This just has ill will written all over it, and I think people started to figure out what was going on... It's the Olympics on steroids. A lot of high fives and ribbon cutting, and then 10 years later, we realize it was a bad idea.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.