Bezos and his dick

Yesterday's news that Amazon will not set up HQ2 in Long Island City is big. I won't go too far into it, save to say that I think it is a loss for New York and for America, in the sense that we are not nurturing our densest metro area which -- for all its faults -- is one of our great treasures, and has been slammed by a lot of things, but nothing so much as the 2017 tax bill and its treatment of state and local taxes, which has provided people with yet another reason to leave the tri-state area. So much good happens there. I will refer you again to Broughton grad Ryan Avent's The Gated City and his well-reasoned defense of density and its benefits writ large.

I am sure that I have shared my love-hate relationship with Amazon and the tech giants. We all have it. We love them and we fear them. Amazon has been ruling the most in the last few years, so it is front and center. As an investor with a data-driven reticence to focus on the selection of individual securities, I frankly expect it to revert to the mean before too long, as most investor infatuations do.

And it is interesting to see how that might be happening: having become the world's richest man, Bezos gets a little caught up in Hollywood, glamour, and beautiful people. Has an affair with a supermodel looking woman. Gets caught. Moves toward divorce from his wife of a quarter century or so.

So now, all of a sudden, Bezos -- who had viewed HQ2 as a way of decentralizing power within the organization -- is staring down the barrel of a divorce which could see his holdings in the company cut in half, roughly, which would further erode his control of the company. So -- HQ2, having been split in half already, is dialed back. The Northern Virginia campus will continue to grow, but it will be a lesser outpost, as will the new Nashville facility. Amazon's core strategic growth for the foreseeable future will continue to be focused in Seattle, a place which is already having a huge affordability crisis. So it is going to be hard to attract and recruit talent there. They are already having to hire just whoever is already there.