Philadelphia lost race for Amazon HQ2 because new CEO is a Giants fan: report

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The future CEO of Amazon’s love for the New York Giants may have sunk Philadelphia’s chances of being chosen for the company’s “HQ2,” according to a new book.

Philadelphia was among the tech giant’s top three finalists for its $5 billion project in June 2018 when Andy Jassy — the current head of Amazon Web Services who will replace Jeff Bezos as CEO later this year — trashed the City of Brotherly Love in an internal meeting, reporter Brad Stone wrote in the new book “Amazon Unbound.”

“Andy Jassy, according to one person’s recollection, opined that he disliked the city, which was a bitter rival of his favorite football team, the New York Giants, and suggested that he and his employees would never want to live there,” Stone wrote.

Jassy seemed to be joking, according to the book, but Amazon eliminated Philadelphia from its shortlist soon thereafter.

In November 2018, Amazon said it would split its new headquarters between Long Island City, Queens and Arlington, Virginia. Amazon later killed plans for its New York location amid protests and opposition from left-wing lawmakers including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Jassy’s lack of brotherly love for Philadelphia reportedly irked employees who had recommended the city after spending months evaluating factors like cost of living, traffic and local governance.

“Some members of the HQ2 team, coming off months of detailed, quantitative work, later expressed exasperation that the process was now exposed to the arbitrary personal preferences of senior executives,” Stone wrote.

Yet Jassy’s love for the Giants runs deep.

“I grew up in New York and my Dad, who’s really a sports freak, had season tickets to the Rangers and Giants, so I went to those games very regularly as a kid,” he told the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2009. “I have very much retained all my New York sports allegiances.”

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