In 2017, Amazon launched a much-hyped search for a new office, which it dubbed “HQ2,” setting off an unprecedented wave of city and state officials crafting incentive packages to win the corporation’s favor. More than two hundred cities ultimately submitted bids, promising Amazon hundreds of millions, and in some cases, billions, of public dollars in return for the supposed investment and job creation that hosting HQ2 would bring.

Many critics believed at the time that this supposedly open competition was rigged from the very beginning: Amazon executives knew where they wanted to go but wanted to maximize the public funds they received and collect data on scores of cities in which they never intended to open a corporate office.

That view was bolstered when Amazon chose to split HQ2 between the New York and Washington, DC, metro areas, placing itself in the world capital of finance and the nation’s capital, two places where it had significant interests that had nothing to do with incentive monies.