Behind Seattle's Amazon Tax: A tech boom that sent house rents soaring

It was, as the local public radio station said, the day “Seattle Nice” died. On May 2, the residents of Seattle were hit with a one-two punch. For months, the city council had been debating a new tax on large employers to raise $75 million for new affordable housing and services for the homeless, whose growing population had burst out of shelters and into tents around the city.

In the late morning, just before a council hearing, a columnist for the Seattle Times broke the news that Amazon.com Inc., the city’s largest employer, was playing hardball. The typically hermetic company said it paused expansion plans for buildings that would house about 7,000 employees pending the outcome of the upcoming tax vote.

Later that night, hundreds of residents packed a Methodist church in the gentrifying Ballard neighbourhood, turning what was supposed to be a civil town hall discussion into a scrum that exposed deep division in the city.

Amazon Prime has now topped 100 million subscribers, reveals Jeff Bezos

Amazon has persuaded more than 100 million shoppers to subscribe to its Prime service that offers free two-day shipping and other perks that help bind people to the company and its ever-expanding empire.

CEO Jeff Bezos quantified the size of Amazon's Prime membership for the first time Wednesday in his annual letter to the Seattle company's shareholders. Before Bezos' revelation, analysts had been left to guess how many people had been willing to pay $99 per year for the Prime service, which Amazon launched 13 years ago as a way to foster customer loyalty.

The scope of Prime's success stunned even the most optimistic of analysts, such as GBH Insights' Daniel Ives. He had previously estimated Amazon had 92 million Prime subscribers.

"It's a mind-boggling number that serves as a key barometer to how big Amazon's kingdom has become," Ives said.

Costco has been selling annual memberships to get bargains on goods stocked in its warehouses for decades, and already been outdone by Amazon's Prime service. Costco has 50.4 million memberships that allow 92 million cardholders to shop in its warehouse and website.

Meet the billionaire whisperer who united Bezos, Buffett and Dimon

Todd Combs spends most of his days reading in a quiet office in Omaha, where he’s an investment manager at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. But one day last year he found himself on a flight to Seattle with an unusual mission: Pitch Jeff Bezos on a bold idea for wringing costs out of the US health-care system.
Two of the biggest corporate chieftains in America—his boss, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon, who runs the largest bank in the country—had already signed on. But they wanted the Amazon.com Inc chief executive officer on board as well.

Combs, 47, a former hedge fund manager who has no experience in the health-care industry and likes to keep a low profile, was both an odd and an obvious choice as the CEOs’ emissary. He had won Buffett’s confidence at Berkshire, where he sparked the company’s largest acquisition, and he’d impressed Dimon so much when the banker visited Omaha that he was invited to join the board of JPMo

Amazon plans $5 billion second headquarters in North America

Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it plans to open another headquarters in North America and spend more than $5 billion for its construction and operation.

The e-commerce company, currently based in Seattle, said it was yet to zero in on a location, but expects to expand the new headquarters to include up to 50,000 high-paying jobs.

Amazon said it was seeking proposals from local and state government leaders for the new headquarters.

Apple Inc had reportedly spent about $5 billion on its spaceship-shaped headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Amazon said its new headquarters should ideally be located in a metropolitan area with more than one million people and one that can attract and retain technical talent.

The company's Seattle headquarters is spread across 8.1 million square feet in 33 buildings and employs more than 40,000 people.

Amazon expects the new headquarters to be a "full equal" to its Seattle office, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement.
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Amazon's big profit miss spooks investors, but analysts stay bullish

A steeper-than-expected drop in quarterly profit rattled some Amazon.com investors, but Wall Street analysts remained largely bullish about the company's aggressive spending plans.

Shares of the e-commerce juggernaut, which have risen 40 per cent this year, were down 4.3 per cent at $1,001 in early trading on Friday, wiping out $21 billion from its market value.

The stock touched a record high on Thursday, helping CEO Jeff Bezos briefly unseat Microsoft Inc co-founder Bill Gates as the world's richest person.

"The overall story coming out of Amazon's second quarter print feels a lot like it did three months ago - accelerating growth, stepped-up investments, lower near-term profitability," JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth said.

"But will anyone care about profit when Amazon is taking bigger chunks of market share?"

The world's largest online retailer reported a better-than-expected rise in revenue, but operating profit came in well short of analysts' estimate as the company continued to pump in money to expand in international markets such as India.
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Amazon's Jeff Bezos asks for philanthropic ideas, gets plenty

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is asking for ideas to help the world through philanthropy — and is getting an earful.

Bezos, whose estimated $72 billion net worth makes him the third richest person in the world according to Forbes magazine, sent out a "request for ideas" in a tweet on Thursday, saying he was considering "a philanthropic strategy" for "the long term."

The billionaire said he believes his companies — including Amazon, the Washington Post and space firm Blue Origin — "are contributing to society and civilisation in their own ways."

But he hopes to use some of his fortune "to be helping people in the here and now — short term — at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact."

The appeal came one day ahead of Amazon's announcement it would buy US grocer Whole Foods Market, further expanding the realm of a business empire that includes retail, cloud computing, streaming video and more.

By early today, the tweet had generated some 18,000 responses, including a number of serious, whimsical or outlandish ideas.

"Childhood hunger in US is solvable problem. We can end it NOW. We have strategy and the track record," one Twitter user wrote.

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Amazon hires record level of office property in 2016

Latest News - US-based e-commerce giant Amazon took about a million of office spaces on lease last year, making it equal to what it took between 2008 and 2015 in the country.

Founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos’ said last year that it would invest another $3 billion in India, amid intense competition in the e-commerce space.

Much of the leased space could be used for seller and development services, besides a 30,000-sq ft building in Bandra Kurla Complex for its India headquarters.

According to Propstack, a data analytics firm for commercial property transactions, various Amazon entities have (Read More)