The multibillionaire Jeff Bezos and his fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, could save $600m in taxes simply because they moved to Florida.
The accounting windfall stems from a $2bn sale of Amazon stock.
Bezos, 59, who is in a three-way race with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Tesla’s Elon Musk for the title of wealthiest American, announced in November he was leaving Seattle after 30 years – ostensibly, he said in an Instagram post, to be nearer his parents and his Blue Origin rocket launches at Cape Canaveral.
“I’ve lived in Seattle longer than I’ve lived anywhere else and have so many amazing memories here. As exciting as the move is, it’s an emotional decision for me. Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart,” he wrote.
But on Tuesday the financial news network CNBC offered another clue to his move: two years ago, Washington introduced a new 7% capital gains tax on sales of stocks or bonds of more than $250,000.
Florida, however, does not levy taxes on income or capital gains.
Bezos, the outlet reported, has been selling billions of dollars of Amazon stock since 1998 to fund his philanthropic operations, Blue Origin, and some of his splashy acquisitions, including new homes on Miami’s “billionaire bunker” island Indian Creek and a $500m 417ft mega-yacht, the Koru.
Last year, after the new tax, Bezos stopped selling Amazon stock – that is until he notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission that he plans to unload 50m shares before 31 January 2025 that at current values would amount to $8.7bn.
On the first $2bn tranche last week, Bezos saved $140m in taxes he would have paid to Washington state, and on the entire sale over the next two years the figure would be about $610m or more, if Amazon stock continues to rise. The savings will nicely cover the expense of the Kuro.
The cost of moving to Miami has been onerous in own right for the couple, who have so far splashed out $147m on two Indian Creek mansions, near the residences of the quarterback Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, and the investor Carl Icahn.
Miami real estate brokers say Bezos is likely to tear down the two homes and build a new one. He is also said to be looking at other properties on the island, which is its own municipality and has its own mayor.
The architect Kobi Karp, who has worked in Miami “since the Miami Vice and Scarface days”, told Bloomberg that the island’s biggest draw is privacy. Paul George, the resident historian at the HistoryMiami Museum told outlet that the island is “only the very wealthy, the billionaires”.
Karp added: “Hundreds of millions aren’t gonna cut it any more.”
But Bezos’s personal real estate projects may not fully to account for what it takes to relocate a multibillionaire, his fiancee and their support staff across a continent. Soon after Bezos announced the couple’s move to Miami, Amazon announced it was looking for 50,000 sq feet of office space in nearby Brickell.
