Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

On today's show, Facebook apologizes for its actions in Myanmar and what happens when private equity owns a popular pizza chain.

The first, Amazon HQ2 or HQ3 or HQ 2. or, well, okay. So last year, Amazon announced it wanted to open a second

headquarters, which would house around 50,000 employees, mostly white collar jobs and engineering

jobs. It also said that cities should bid for the honor. And they did 238 of them, to be

exact. So some were large cities like Atlanta and

Denver. Some were small, including a little regional consortium that actually includes my Massachusetts

town of less than 10,000 people. Suffice to say, my town's bid didn't make the cut. But this past

January, Amazon did publicly narrow the finalists down to 20, and over

this past weekend, the Washington Post reported that it had settled on Crystal City, a D.C. suburb

in Northern Virginia. Then yesterday came two new pieces of news. First, the Wall Street

Journal saying that Amazon might actually pick two HQ-2s, namely because it didn't think it could

find enough tech talent in a

single market. And then the New York Times followed up by saying that the other site would be

Long Island City in Queens. Now, we've said before on the podcast that the Amazon HQ2 process

has been a PR masterstroke, getting everyone to not only talk about the company, but to talk about

it in positive terms, like how picking

City A or City B would really help with economic development, improve the local tech ecosystem,

etc. But if the split news is right, the hype was pretty empty. So for starters, Headquarters is a

singular term. We should reiterate that over and over. It's a singular term, but we were willing

to let

Amazon slide on HQ2 until yesterday. Picking multiple sites, that's not HQ2 or HQ3. Those are just

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