Amazon wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Bernie Madoff
aka as Inside Jeff Bezo's DC life
The Amazon founder and Washington Post owner has quietly become a freewheeling DC socialite—and soon he'll be spending more time here, in the mammoth Kalorama home his family is renovating. What brought the tech giant to town in the first place? And what does he do, exactly, while he's around? The story of how the world's richest man is becoming a Washingtonian.
ate one drizzly night this past January, Jeff Bezos strode through the front door of the Jefferson hotel, burnished from an evening spent consorting with the Washington power set and smiling in plain view. This year, the Amazon founder, who is worth more than $110 billion, became the richest person alive. Here at the Jefferson, around 11:30 pm on a Saturday, a flicker of his unstudied private life appeared.
Bezos wore blue jeans and a teal vest, the approximation of an Eddie Bauer model, and across his cocked elbow, his wife, MacKenzie, dangled two palms with practiced ease. His security detail, for which Amazon pays $1.6 million a year, was nowhere in sight. The wealthiest man on earth appeared simply to have walked up 16th Street, untroubled by courtiers and well-wishers (or the occasional protester). A brood of ruddy-faced tourists, who collected and dispersed in the hotel lobby, would not pirouette as the couple sliced through their gaze. Actually, no one offered so much as a glance. When I alerted the concierge to the whiff of celebrity in our midst, the young woman cocked a quizzical eye across the table: “Who’s Jeff Bezos?”
Soon we’ll all know him. You may even bump into the man. Just as Bezos has busied himself pushing his Seattle company to new feats, the inventor of the “everything store” has been quietly moonlighting in a town that, friends say, he views as an everything city—a delta of diplomats and techies, military engineers and journalists, powerbrokers and problem solvers, a mélange perfectly suited to the tinkerer’s heterodox taste. Confidants report that Bezos spends more time in Washington than in any other city outside of Seattle—ten trips a year, give or take—and for good reason. Not content merely to own the local newspaper, the retail guru has become the owner of the largest home in DC. In 2016, he bought the former Textile Museum, a 27,000-square-foot mansion in Kalorama, and last year he began a massive renovation and expansion—the plans for which foretell the ambitiousness of the life he intends to have here. All of this prefigures the question of whether Amazon will bring its new headquarters—HQ2, in the parlance of the 20 municipalities vying to win it—to Washington, too.
Bezos is attracted — like a moth to light — to Washington.
“What he’s going to do is revive the legacy of Kay Graham and her great socializing—bringing smart, interesting people together in a social context,” says Jean Case, referring to the late Washington Post publisher. Case and her husband, Steve, the cofounder of AOL, have been friends with the Bezoses since the mid-’90s. Over breakfast in front of the fireplace at the Cases’ home earlier this year, Bezos described his plans. “That’s how they see this house that they’re renovating in Kalorama,” Case says. “They’ll really use it as a magnet of smart, interesting people from all walks.”
It makes sense that a billionaire with numerous interests before the federal government might resurrect Graham’s fabled salons—to some, an artifact of a time when politics was supposedly less blood sport. Yet Bezos also owns homes in Beverly Hills, West Texas, and New York. His infatuation with the nation’s capital provokes its own riddle even among those who know him. “It’s a bit of a mystery to me—whether he has political ambitions or thinks he needs to be on the right side of Washington, for Amazon,” one friend of the Bezos family admits. Yet “Bezos is attracted—like a moth to light—to Washington.”
Conversations with more than 40 people in or around Bezos’s circle offer some insight into what brings his jet to town and what he does when he gets here—a curiosity that Washingtonians (and Bezos’s employees and politicians and HQ2 speculators) are all eager to unspool. Given our city’s infamous weakness for celebrity, the predictable scramble to receive him will etch itself into the history of this town—perhaps as much as the man will himself.
rest at link(s)
cnbs link is the madoff connection
https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/04/22/inside-jeff-bezos-dc-life/
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/23/amazon-wouldnt-have-happened-if-it-werent-for-bernie-madoff.html