Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whose vision shaped the coffee giant’s growth into a global brand, has departed his longtime home of Seattle for sunny Miami.

Schultz, who served as CEO three separate times at the Seattle-based company, announced the tandem decision with his wife, Sheri, on LinkedIn on Tuesday evening.

“For those of you who know us well, we have entered the ‘retirement’ phase of our lives,” Schultz wrote. “And we have moved to Miami for our next adventure together.”

The billionaire alluded to the business environment in Washington, where a measure that’s been dubbed a“millionaires tax” came closer to final legislative approval on Tuesday, saying: “It is our hope that Washington will remain a place for business and entrepreneurship to thrive, creating essential opportunity for those in Seattle and the surrounding areas.”

Schultz, 72, has a net worth of $3.5 billion, per Forbes, which is less than his 10-year high of almost $5 billion in 2019.

The news comes one week after Starbucks tapped Tennessee as the home of a new corporate operations office, though the company confirmed there are no plans to move its headquarters out of Seattle.

However, Rian Watt, executive director of Seattle nonprofit Economic Opportunity Institute, doesn’t see a substantial link between the legislative progress of the “millionaires tax” bill and Schultz’s relocation.

“It seems like this move had already happened, and, obviously, the ‘millionaires tax,’ if it’s passed, wouldn’t go into effect until 2029,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

When Watt hears criticism about the measure potentially pushing wealthy Americans out of Washington, he responds, “This is a tax on personal income, not on business income. So to some extent, I think it’s a little non sequitur.”

Schultz helped build Starbucks into the industry fixture it is today after buying the company from founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker in 1987. He served three stints in leadership roles before finally stepping away from the Starbucks board of directors in 2023.

But Schultz clashed during his last years at Starbucks with a budding labor movement that pushed for unionizing store workers. His contentious relationship with the union attracted lawmakers’ attention. In 2023, he testified before a U.S. Senate committee headed by Sen. Bernie Sanders in Washington, D.C. and addressed claims of union busting and federal labor law violations at the company.

Schultz remains the “lifelong chairman emeritus” at Starbucks.

The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

As he tells it online, he first moved to Seattle from New York City with Sheri in 1982. While she worked in design as the family’s “breadwinner,” he took a job at Starbucks, starting as head of retail sales and marketing.

“Back then, the Pike Place Starbucks only sold whole bean coffee,” Schultz wrote. “Today, it’s the most visited Starbucks in the world.”

The Schultz Family Foundation, a nonprofit established in 1996, will continue its operations in Seattle, Schultz confirmed. However, a new leader, Vivek Varma, who has served as the foundation’s CEO and vice chair, is at the helm of the organization.

Varma was part of the executive leadership team at Starbucks for over a decade. Before that, he worked at Microsoft for almost 13 years.

The Schultz family’s private office will relocate to Miami.

Schultz shelled out around $44 million for a penthouse at the Surf Club, Four Seasons Private Residences in Surfside, Florida, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Surfside is often referred to as “Miami’s uptown beach town.” It’s located in Miami-Dade County, with Miami Beach to its south.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos left Seattle in 2023 and resettled in nearby Indian Creek, a man-made island nicknamed the “Billionaire Bunker.”

Schultz lived in a mansion in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood along Lake Washington. Prior to that, his family resided in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood, though they moved after a yearslong legal battle with neighbors over property expansion into Viretta Park, which is public land.

He made an impact on other aspects of life in the city outside of business— for better or worse, depending on who you ask.

An ownership group of investors led by Schultz purchased the Seattle SuperSonics, the now-defunct men’s basketball team, and the Seattle Storm, the women’s basketball team, for $200 million in 2001. After five years in charge, Schultz sold both teams for $350 million in 2006.

The Sonics ultimately moved to Oklahoma City in 2008 and began playing as the Oklahoma City Thunder. Many Seattleites still grieve the loss of the National Basketball Association team and the hole it left in the local sports scene.

Over a decade later, Schultz apologized to the Sonics fandom. In a 2019 autobiography, he wrote: “Almost everyone blamed me, and after some initial denial, I realized they were right to do so. I had squandered the very public trust that I had bought into.”

Schultz toyed with the idea of running for the presidency in 2020 as a centrist independent based on a platform of unseating President Donald Trump and improving the country’s two-party system, but he ultimately decided against it.

In an opinion piece published in The Seattle Times, he explained his position. “It’s true that Seattle and I have had a complicated relationship,” Schultz wrote in 2019.

The city became his “adopted hometown,” he said, after a childhood spent in Brooklyn public housing.

Neither of his parents graduated high school, and his father worked several jobs like truck driver and factory worker, per the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a nonprofit that has awarded Schultz in 2007.

“I did not have an unhappy childhood, but we lived daily with the constant stress of financial issues,” he said at the time. “By the time I got to high school, I understood the stigma of living in the projects and knew I had to escape the struggle my parents lived with every day.”

But Schultz has now moved on to more tropical pastures.

“We will be forever grateful for the memories made in Seattle and the relationships built along the way,” Schultz wrote in his LinkedIn post Tuesday. “To the family, friends and partners who made Seattle our home for so many years, thank you.”

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