Amazon’s HQ2 at a crossroads

Hi, it’s Matt, reporting from Arlington, Virginia. Amazon’s second headquarters is a shrine to another era. But first...Three things you nee [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, it’s Matt, reporting from Arlington, Virginia. Amazon’s second headquarters is a shrine to another era. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Amazon will [launch satellites]( • The SEC is trying to [force Musk to testify]( • Apple considered [switching to DuckDuckGo]( HQ1.5 Amazon HQ2, the corporate site selection project, was a symbol of the tech industry’s [economic muscle](. Now it stands as a palace built for a former dynasty. Just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, in an office park tucked between the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, sit two gleaming, 22-story towers, home to 8,000 Amazon employees. The company started moving workers into its Metropolitan Park development this year, and the breaking in continued a few weeks ago when the company held its first big news conference at the site, a [product unveiling for Alexa devices]( that had been held in prior years at the Seattle headquarters. During a tour that week, it was somewhere between the outdoor terrace with electric grills, the plant-lined staircase and the sconces by the elevator that I realized this was built for an Amazon of another era. For most of Amazon’s life, it was deliberately not a fancy-light-fixtures kind of company. In contrast to its free-lunch-and-laundry-service peers, Amazon has always liked to brag that Jeff Bezos built one of the company’s first desks out of a wooden door and four-by-fours. About five years ago, Amazon’s Seattle facilities chief told me with pride that employees were free to make their own drip coffee in the kitchen — if they bought the coffee grounds themselves. HQ2 is not that. The company’s south tower, called Merlin, evokes a DC-area hotel of the 1930s or ’40s. Black paneling lines the walls of common areas. Wood touches and plant arrangements are everywhere. Some areas at HQ2 contain “team suites” with couches and meeting rooms, which can be reserved for groups that want to spend their days away from desks. The spaces were designed to encourage workers to leave the comforts of home and come into the office. (Another incentive is to not get fired.)  “The cubicle isn’t enough anymore,” said Brian Earle, of ZGF, the lead architect. These touches extend to the Amazon Visitor Landing, a museum the company built for itself that doubles as a visitor center. It was here that I met Patrick Phillippi, an Amazon employee charged with carrying the corporate banner at Arlington-area community meetings, delivering cookies to neighboring buildings (an apology for construction noise) and slapping the Amazon logo on the back of local youth soccer jerseys. That’s another contrast to Seattle, where for its first couple of decades the company was mostly unresponsive to local groups and politicians. That left the company short on political capital when the city rolled out a payroll tax on large employers. “We can get it right from the beginning,” said Brian Huseman, Amazon’s HQ2-based vice president of public policy. Amazon’s museum also features a scale model of the company’s full proposed campus, which, in addition to the two occupied towers, includes a development up the street, three more skyscrapers and a soft-serve ice cream cone-shaped workspace called the Helix. The whole thing is enough to make someone forget Amazon’s tradition of, and recent return to, austerity. The company has terminated 27,000 workers since November, meant as a corrective measure after a massive expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic. For some teams, [headcount has been frozen]( for more than a year. The land where Amazon plans to build the Helix and its other structures is an empty lot with some trees. Amazon [postponed development indefinitely](, Bloomberg first reported in March. Huseman said the company is still committed to the project and the 25,000 jobs it promised northern Virginia — in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in [tax breaks]( — but offered no update on timing. From door desk to gourmet coffee bars onsite, HQ2 was one of the last grand gestures of the Bezos era. It falls to his successor, Andy Jassy, to decide whether to resume the project as designed or opt for a more frugal alternative. —[Matt Day](mailto:mday63@bloomberg.net) The big story A former operating chief, a college friend and an ex-girlfriend are all expected to testify in the fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried. Bloomberg is inside the courtroom, and you can listen to a [special episode of the podcast]( Spellcaster: The Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried to get caught up. Get fully charged Clorox stock fell after the company detailed the [financial impact of its cyberattack](. UK’s rival to Nvidia is seeking to [raise funds after reporting losses](. The venture-backed Indian hotel-tech chain [Oyo is talking to Apollo]( about refinancing a $660 million loan. More from Bloomberg Live event: The Bloomberg Technology Summit in London will host top technology leaders, business executives, innovators and entrepreneurs on Oct. 24. The event will explore the rapid advance of AI, green technology, the escalation of cyber warfare and more. [Register here](. 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