Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got out of Washington before it became a more expensive place to be a billionaire.
In spring 2025, he sold his Hunts Point mansion for $63 million, according to King County property records. It’s the most expensive home sale on record in the state, Puget Sound Business Journal reported. The sale came about a year and a half after he and his now-wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, moved to Miami.
Now the state he left is testing a tax aimed at high earners. In March, Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed a law that adds a 9.9% levy on household income above $1 million. It reaches roughly 30,000 taxpayers and is Washington’s first income tax in more than 90 years. The tax is set to begin in 2028, with the first payments due in April 2029. Whether it survives is up to voters. Initiative 645, on the Nov. 3 ballot, would repeal the tax and explicitly ban income taxes in the state. A separate lawsuit arguing the tax is unconstitutional is still pending. The state Supreme Court has also deadlocked 4-4 over a ballot statement warning that repeal would mean cuts to education and health care, so that language will appear on the ballot.
The new tax comes on top of the capital gains tax that Washington’s high court upheld in 2023, which now runs as high as 9.9%. Observers have long speculated that the capital gains tax helped drive Bezos to Florida, which has no state income tax. Bezos is now worth $365 billion, making him the world’s second-richest person behind Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He and Sánchez Bezos live in a three-home compound on Indian Creek, the Miami-area island nicknamed the Billionaire Bunker. He has spent $237 million buying property there.
Bezos bought the 9,420-square-foot Hunts Point property in 2019 for $37.5 million, the same year he and novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott divorced. That means he sold it for about $25.5 million more than he paid.
Courtesy of Michael WALMSLEY
The sprawling mansion sits on 3.27 acres in the elite town of Hunts Point in King County, Wash., which overlooks Lake Washington. It’s just about seven miles away from Amazon headquarters in downtown Seattle and where other major tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google have offices. The average home price there is more than $8 million, according to Zillow. Home prices in Seattle have been rising ever since the city became a tech hub, and now it’s one of the priciest housing markets in the country.
Bezos’s former Washington home has three bedrooms, four bathrooms, an elevator, a massive walk-in closet, a secondary kitchen, a rooftop terrace, and a glass walkway that connects the property to a two-story guesthouse. The mansion stretches more than 300 feet across Lake Washington’s waterfront.
Courtesy of Michael WALMSLEY
According to property records, the home was previously owned by late art collector and luxury travel executive Barney A. Ebsworth, who was also one of the initial investors in Build-A-Bear.
Bezos made the move from Seattle to Miami in late 2023, and said the reason for the change was to be closer to his parents.
“My parents have always been my biggest supporters,” he posted to his Instagram account, adding his aerospace company, Blue Origin, is increasingly shifting operations to Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Seattle had also been Bezos’s home ever since he started Amazon in 1994.
“I’ve lived in Seattle longer than I’ve lived anywhere else and have so many amazing memories here,” Bezos said in his Instagram post announcing his move. “Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart.”
John Pantekidis, managing partner and general counsel at TwinFocus, which manages over $7 billion for ultrahigh-net-worth families, previously told Fortune that Florida makes it “very cost effective for folks like Jeff to live down there. It’s ideal, it’s nirvana.”
Bezos bought the latest of his three Indian Creek homes in 2024 for $90 million, a six-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion spanning more than 12,000 square feet. There are only about 40 homes on the island, according to Robb Report.
Other celebrities, including Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, have lived in this 300-acre gated community, which is “one of the wealthiest, private, most secure communities in Miami Beach, and the world,” according to Florida-based luxury real estate firm the Light Group.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on October 20, 2025.
