As I cruised by the home of the richest man on the planet, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, I already knew that he was never going to pick Santa Barbara as Amazon’s second mega-headquarters. Bezos is shopping for a lucky (?) city where he plans to invest $5 billion and create 50,000 high-paying jobs. But even if we did get the nod, why would we want to be squashed like an Amazon package dropped from a truck on Highway 101?
As our family station wagon rolled down Evergreen Point Road in the tiny Seattle suburb of Medina (pronounced “Me-dye-na”), past Bezos’s hidden five-acre estate, I knew security cameras were peering at us at each intersection. I’d been warned that we would likely be stopped and questioned by police if we dared to venture into the tiny town, an easy commute to corporate mecca Bellevue, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. But I was curious what kind of a neighborhood a man worth $130 billion would choose as home turf.
No one paid the slightest attention to us. Woodsy Medina reminded me a lot of Hope Ranch. Fellow billionaire Bill Gates lives about a half mile away from Bezos, but you can’t see his $125 million compound from the road, either. I wondered if the two tech bosses bumped into one another while strolling around the neighborhood.