Bezos’s frustration with what he deemed meager government largess prompted executives to scrap lessons learned through the years in favour of an unapologetic appeal for tax breaks and other incentives for its HQ2. — Dreamstime/TNS
When Elon Musk secured US$1.3bil (RM5.34bil) from Nevada in 2014 to open a gigantic battery plant, Jeff Bezos noticed. In meetings, the Amazon.com Inc chief expressed envy for how Musk had pitted five Western states against one another in a bidding war for thousands of manufacturing jobs; he wondered why Amazon was okay with accepting comparatively trifling incentives.
It was a theme Bezos returned to often, according to four people privy to his thinking. Then in 2017, an Amazon executive sent around a congratulatory email lauding his team for landing US$40mil (RM164.57mil) in government incentives to build a US$1.5bil (RM6.17bil) air hub near Cincinnati. The paltry sum irked Bezos, the people say, and made him even more determined to try something new.
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