Trump Says Amazon 'Took the Best Deals' for New Headquarters

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said Amazon.com Inc. "took the best deals" in deciding to split its new headquarters between New York and Arlington, Virginia.

The cities are "giving up a lot," Trump said in an interview with the conservative website Daily Caller published Wednesday. He said the deals, which were announced Tuesday, were "expensive."

New York put up billions in incentives, while Arlington, just outside Washington, D.C., offered hundreds of millions. Both have been promised 25,000 good-paying jobs and help in attracting potentially billions of dollars in private investment. Virginia got the best deal, offering about half the incentives that New York did for similar benefits.

The choices suggest that Amazon looked beyond economic incentives to things like an educated workforce and proximity to decision-makers in its search. Details from the hundreds of cities that sought the offices, and the 17 finalists that failed to win, had not all been made public. Nashville, Tennessee, also won a smaller Amazon facility.

Trump, a former real estate developer who has often feuded with the online retail giant and threatened it with antitrust investigations, suggested in the interview that a decline in the company’s fortunes would make the cities’ incentives look foolish.

"Maybe Amazon will have massive competition and they won’t be the same company in five years in which case it would be a big mistake," Trump said in the interview.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Brody in Washington at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Joshua Gallu

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