Amazon's New York Helipad Will Be Funded by... Taxpayers
Amazon has announced the location of its new headquarters, officially wrapped up its months-long, tax-break seeking version of The Bachelor. After making cities across the country jump through hoops and pitch woo and promise to just give Amazon its own town, the trillion-dollar company settled on... New York and Washington, D.C. Specifically, Long Island City and Arlington.
In exchange for bringing an estimated 25,000 jobs to each site, Amazon will receive more than $2 billion in tax credits and other incentives. Among those incentives: helipads. Per Quartz:
The state Urban Development Corporation, the city Economic Development Corporation and the mayor’s office will help Amazon “secure access to a helipad on the Development Sites,” states the memo, dated yesterday (Nov. 12). If for some reason they can’t, officials say they will help the company get one “in an alternative location in reasonable proximity to the Development Sites” in Long Island City, where Amazon intends to build one of its two new headquarters.
A helipad may seem like an odd thing to single out, but in a way it represents a lot about Amazon's relationship to money, taxes, and community. Amazon already legally paid no federal income tax in 2017. If there's any company in the world that doesn't need tax breaks, it's arguably Amazon. And some people find the idea that the richest company in the world will get public money to set up private infrastructure in a city where public transportation is falling apart to be a little, well, galling. It prompted Fast Company to declare, "New York got played by Amazon." And Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared the same sentiment on Twitter.
In an interview this year with Business Insider, Mathias Döpfner asked Bezos what money means to him as "the first person in history who has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions." Bezos responded:
The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune. I am liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time. Because you're right, you're not going to spend it on a second dinner out.
There are, obviously, a lot of things that Bezos could do with that $1 billion a year, including getting his employees off of food stamps. The very least he could do is fund his own helipad.
