Washington Monthly - The Exploitative Origins of Amazon

Senior Reporter Karina Montoya shines a light on the destructive path Bezos and Amazon leave in their tracks by stealing ideas, squelching competition, and cheating on its taxes.

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos kicked off the year making headlines for selling 24 million shares of his company for $4 billion. The move came right after he relocated to Florida, a state that doesn’t levy capital gains tax, allowing him to dodge a $595 million tax bill from the state of Washington. 

But as much as Americans may be used to seeing billionaires avoid taxes, the schemes of Bezos and Amazon leave a trail of destruction that goes beyond protecting personal wealth. We learn that, and much more, when we go back to the origins of Amazon and watch it morph into the giant that it is today. In The Everything War, the journalist Dana Mattioli shows us at length that Bezos’s legacy is far more insidious than we ever suspected.

In 1995, Amazon emerged as a scrappy online bookseller promising cheap book deliveries across the country. Yet despite its friendly, up-and-coming image, from its very founding exploiting tax loopholes was central to Amazon’s growth. By designating the company’s warehouses as subsidiaries, Bezos exploited a tax loophole from a 1992 Supreme Court decision that couldn’t have possibly anticipated Amazon’s ubiquity. When Amazon could no longer keep this advantage, beginning around 2012, the tech giant’s strategy changed to secure tax breaks and subsidies from towns and cities where it landed. 

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