Bezos saves $1 billion in taxes after moving out of WA

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, has allegedly saved nearly $1 billion this year alone in taxes after calling Florida his primary residence instead of Washington.

Bezos announced late last year he was moving from Washington to Indian Creek Village — an exclusive area in Miami, Fla. also known as “Billionaire Bunker,” famous for its celebrity residents including Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Bezos’ waterfront mansion is 19,000 square feet and cost him approximately $79 million.

More on Bezos’ move: Jeff Bezos is leaving Seattle for the sunnier confines of Miami

He cited he wanted to be closer to his parents, who are located in Miami, and to be closer to Blue Origin, his aerospace company located in Cape Canaveral. But, just three months after his cross-country move, Bezos unloaded 12 million shares of Amazon.com Inc. stock last week, netting him just over $2 billion, according to filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The sale of this volume of stock won’t be completed until Jan. 31.

Bezos owned 988 million shares, nearly 10% of Amazon, before he began selling them last year. As of this reporting, Bezos has sold an estimated $13.6 billion worth of Amazon stock after he announced he was leaving Washington for Florida, according to Forbes.

If he sold that much stock as a resident of Washington, which houses a 7% levy on long-term capital gains of more than $250,000, he would have owed $954 million in state taxes, according to Fortune.

More on capital gains tax in WA: Capital gains tax to stay in place; WA cares measure not called

An initiative to kill the capital gains tax was presented in the most recent general election for Washington voters but 63.2% of residents chose to keep it in place. Meanwhile, Florida has neither a capital gains tax nor a state income tax.

Despite his financial savviness, Bezos stands as only the second-wealthiest man in the world, trailing Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and co-head of “The Department of Government Efficiency,” a new federal government commission under Donald Trump’s upcoming second term. Elon Musk has an approximate net worth of $474 billion, while Bezos’ net worth stands at $251 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of FaceBook and its parent company Meta, is the third-richest person in the world, with a net worth of approximately $221 billion.

Frank Sumrall is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here and you can email him here