Headlines for billionaires

So, it echoed all the way over here. Every newscast reported. The big news that Jeff Bezos was buying the Washington Post. The Millennium innovator meeting the legendary 136-year old newspaper. And once again a successful Seattle billionaire is making headlines.

In 1993, when I first came to Seattle, Microsoft was still a company, a young adult at age. People working at Microsoft were young too. You were (and to a large extend still is) expected to work around the clock, and important meetings were scheduled in the evenings. That took care of the problem with employees starting families. If you had to go home to your children in the evening, you were out of the loop at the office, a self-regulating lay off system to keep the company young.

Bill Gates was accused for being greedy. Donations from his burgeoning wealth seemed to be in his own interest: computers and software only. His 6100 square meter mansion took seven years (1988-95) to complete. I remember the building cranes south of the 520 Bridge bridgehead at Lake Washington in Medina. Year after year. Although Seattle is populated with a large amount of wealthy people and the city is sprinkled with spectacular homes, the Gates’ building site was kind of obnoxious and the talk of the town for about ten years.

At about the time when Bill Gates and his wife Melinda moved in to their Pacific Lodge-style, super high tech earth-sheltered (cut into the mountain) home, Jeff Bezos came driving across the country from New York, writing up the Amazon.com business plan on the way.

The reason for him to choose Seattle for his fresh internet-based business, was a then new US Supreme Court rule that online retailers would not have to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence"; he headed to Washington because of it’s small population and presumptive customers mostly being out of state. That was his plan.

And the plan worked. Amazon started out as an Internet bookstore. Then added music, film and today you can bay most anything from A to Z from the company, even food! Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer. As Microsoft is the largest company in software developing.

While Bill Gates and his company have matured and found their places in Seattle and the world, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are still young. Back in 1993 it wasn’t on the map that Bill Gates would turn into the most generous and powerful philanthropist in the world. The home of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was until they moved in to their new headquarters across from Seattle Center in 2011, a humble Eastlake building which you had to look for to find.

Amazon, on the other hand, is now the teenager who is taking up far more space than some of Seattle is comfortable with. And interesting it is, that there is a link between the two biggest-in-the-world companies.

Paul Allen founded Microsoft with his Lakeside high school pal Bill Gates. He left the company in 2000 to focus on philanthropy and developing within his company Vulcan Inc. 1992 already, he started investing in South Lake Union, a run down industrial area in the middle of Seattle, neighboring the southern tip of pretty Lake Union. Today Vulcan owns a large part of it. The South Lake Union redevelopment represents one of the largest urban revitalization projects in the US. New residential areas, office, retail and biotech research space are replacing one-story garages, paint shops and boat supplies.

Amazon started out pretty much as an underground thing where sales people were picked from the street (this was in 1994 and everybody was hiring) answering phones on desks made out of old doors placed on home made hammer-and-nailed wooden frames. Today, the Amazon headquarters campus at South Lake Union is totaling 11 buildings, built by Vulcan and later purchased by Amazon. The Amazon presence in Downtown Seattle is in total 6 million square feet with a workforce of 91 000 employees, pretty much the exact same numbers as Microsoft which is located in Redmond, Eastside Seattle.

That said, Amazon has kept a low profile. You won’t find any logos on those buildings. That’s why their new three block development in progress at South Lake Union is racing eyebrows: three giant glass-and-steel spheres capable of accommodating mature trees, accompanied by high-rise office towers. Built by Vulcan.

So, the basement flannel company is coming out in the daylight, needing air and taking up a lot of Seattle space. And the founder, Jeff Bezos, is investing in the more eastern Washington, buying the Washington Post.

When I first came to Seattle twenty years ago, Microsoft was about 20 years old, an annoying young adult. Bill Gates, at that age, made the impression still fighting acne, needing a lot of deodorant. Amazon started the year after and is today the same age: a baby cuckoo needing a bigger nest. Jeff Bezos has been a much more reticent public figure than Bill Gates. His private Washington Post purchase is therefore raising eyebrows the same way the giant glass spheres do.

But who knows what Jeff Bezos legacy will be in another twenty years? Bill Gates certainly surprised everyone. Only time will tell.