Jeff Bezos reaps Florida tax benefit with $4 billion Amazon share sale
Jeff Bezos didn’t cite taxes among the reasons for his move to Miami from the Seattle region, but the fiscal benefits of his relocation to the Sunshine State are becoming very obvious. Leaving Washington state, which has a 7% tax on capital gains, could have saved Bezos $288 million in taxes after he unloaded $4 billion of Amazon stock in the past week.
Bezos said in November that was he moving to Florida, which doesn’t tax capital gains, to be closer to his parents and the Cape Canaveral operations of his space-exploration company Blue Origin. The announcement came a week before he put in place a 10(b)5-1 plan to sell as many as 50 million Amazon shares, worth potentially more than $8 billion.
The world’s secondrichest person has already flexed his presence in his new neighborhood. The Amazon founder has spent $147 million to buy two homes in
Indian
Creek, a man-made barrier island known as the “Billionaire
Bunker.”
He’s expected to tear down and replace the homes with custom builds. But for the state Bezos left behind, it’s potentially missing out on tax revenue that could have gone to education and school construction — the designated recipients of Washington’s capital gains tax.
Spokespeople for Bezos and Amazon declined to comment on the stock sales.
The almost $900 million that the tax brought in last year on capital gains realized in 2022 blew past the state’s estimates. More than half of that revenue came from just 10 people, according to state officials.
Bezos’s move demonstrates how hard it is for states to pin down the most valuable taxpayers, especially in a post-pandemic world where people and businesses are finding it easier to shift location within the U.S. Miami especially has become a magnet for the ultra-rich and their businesses thanks to its low taxes and high quality of life. Several finance moguls, such as Ken Griffin and Josh Harris, have moved to the region in recent years.