Future Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s Giants fandom reportedly led to Philly losing bid for company’s HQ2

Philadelphia had been a potential location for Amazon’s HQ2. However, future CEO Andy Jassy’s love for the Giants may have ended that development.

“Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,” a book written by Silicon Valley reporter Brad Stone that released last Tuesday, reveals Philadelphia was, in June 2018, one of the three finalists for Amazon’s “HQ2,” a massive $5 billion project.

However, there’s a chance Bezos’ eventual replacement as CEO, head of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy, and his love for the New York Giants ended Philly’s bid to be the host city of the project.

In the book, Stone writes: “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,” per Theo Wayt of the New York Post.

Philly was eventually eliminated as a potential host city, but that doesn’t mean employees were in favor of Jassy’s opinion.

Stone additionally writes, “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,” also per Wayt.

Eventually, in November 2018, the company decided to locate HQ2 in both Long Island City, Queens as well as Arlington, Virginia, with 25,000 workers to be placed at either site.

That was until Amazon called off the possibility of a New York site following protests from both residents and politicians, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district.

Jassy attended Scarsdale High School in Westchester County, New York.