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Jeff Bezos' $23 million purchase could be the key to finding Amazon HQ2.
- Amazon announced the 20 finalists for it's new $5 billion headquarters, nicknamed HQ2.
- Three of the locations are in the Washington D.C. Metro Area.
- There are a lot of reasons CEO Jeff Bezos might want to locate there, but the two biggest might be his new $23 million D.C. mansion and The Washington Post, which he owns.
Amazon announced the finalists Thursday for Amazon's new $5 billion headquarters - and the 50,000 high-paying jobs that come with it - but one look at the list drops a heavy hint at where the global e-commerce giant will go.
The final list includes 20 major cities, three of which are located in the same area: Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, VA, and Montgomery County, MD.
Those three are all within striking distance of Bezos' biggest recent purchase - a $23 million 27,000 square-foot mansion located in Kalorama, the historic DC neighborhood home to numerous bigwigs in media,
The mansion, which was once the Textile Museum, is the largest private home in D.C., and is just blocks from the homes of Barack and Michelle Obama and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who both moved to the Kalorama neighborhood earlier this year.
As Business Insider's Dennis Green noted, DC offers a lot of advantages for HQ2: robust transportation and education systems, a large educated workforce, and high livability.
In addition, the proximity to Capitol Hill, as well as the numerous potential government contracts that could result deeper partnerships with Washington can't be ignored.
But perhaps, the biggest indicator is in Kalorama.
Bezos handed off running Amazon's consumer business and cloud computing to two deputies two years ago in order to allow him to shift his focus to developing The Washington Post. The Amazon CEO now hosts conferences calls with Post leadership twice a month and hosts them in Seattle twice a year, and visits the DC offices 10 times a year, the New York Times reported last week.
And Bezos reportedly plans to host regular "salon-style dinners" at the Kalorama house, according to the Times, to bring together D.C.'s power elite and make his home a center for the city.
If Bezos intends to increase his focus on developing the Post while raising his profile as one of Washington's major arbiters of power and keeping a close eye on his e-commerce empire, the DC-Metro area is the only logical option.
We took a walk through Bezos's new neighborhood on a recent trip to Washington, DC, to see why the area is such a coveted destination.