In the journalese about Bezos's latest buy and wondering why, I have yet to see a mention of why Bezos quit managing hedge funds to start up Amazon. He noticed

In the journalese about Bezos's latest buy and wondering why, I have yet to see a mention of why Bezos quit managing hedge funds to start up Amazon. He noticed that there was a tax benefit to selling across state lines, i.e. no state sales tax had to be paid. Hence he setup in favourable Washington state rather than anywhere else, to keep things a lot more tax efficient than his competitors. At the time those competitors did not notice what he was doing. With where we are now there is the real possibility that Bezos has outwitted everyone again with some loophole/tax perk that you would have to be an investment banker to really appreciate.