Amazon worldwide consumer CEO Dave Clark, one of the e-commerce giant's three most powerful executives, has sold his primary Seattle-area residence and moved to Texas, Insider has learned.
Clark sold his 8,500-square-foot home in the Seattle suburb of Medina for $14.5 million last September, more than double what he paid for it in 2018, property records show. The couple had settled in Dallas by October, according to posts on Clark's wife's Instagram account. Dallas luxury realtor Joan Eleazer, who said the couple toured several homes she was listing, told Insider that Clark had purchased a new home in the upscale Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that Clark moved to Dallas last fall.
The relocation came before a new 7% Washington state tax on capital gains took effect at the start of 2022. The executive owns about $42 million in Amazon stock, according to federal securities filings from late last year.
Clark is not the only head of industry to have decamped to Texas as new state taxes emerge. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk moved from California to Texas in 2020. The move may have saved Musk, often the richest man in the world, billions of dollars in state capital gains taxes.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns a large property in Texas near the launchpad for his space company, Blue Origin.
In late 2020, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC that he believed remote work harmed innovation. Until last fall, the company had communicated to employees that it hoped to return to "an office-centric culture" as the pandemic abated.
Amazon reversed course last October, allowing corporate employees to continue working remotely indefinitely with the permission of their manager. The company, though, insisted that employees live close enough to their assigned offices to be able to "easily" travel there on one day's notice, Jassy said in an email to employees last year. Employees who wanted to live further away would need to seek approval from their vice president, the email said.
Clark manages one of the most geographically-dispersed organizations at Amazon, overseeing more than 1 million employees who work at warehouses. His division has 2 corporate hubs, in Bellevue, Washington, and Nashville.
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