The greatest mystery in the Universe is figuring out who (or what) is pulling the strings. Something a little more palatable may be unmasking who is really responsible for the actions of the infamous One-Percent [class]. -- That answer is much more simple: every person is ultimately responsible for their own actions (as long as they can keep their behavior in-check). A better question may be: just how far is the reach of our planet's most resourceful? To help us answer this (which is actually the subject of derivative position paper📄) is the enigmatic Mr. Alphabet himself.
In my opera, Easter, Mister Alphabet (real name: Dwight Mann) is the world's richest person, by far (more than double in wealth of the next richest person on the list). With Brandywine ties (he possesses a Wharton MBA and a Princeton engineering degree -- I modeled him after both Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Robert Pera, and now you know🙂), this 👟tennis shoe-wearing, leather jacket-sporting guru may also be one of its most intelligent. An extremely ambitious entrepreneur, Mann actually is a quite respected and rational leader as he heads Nile, LLC, a garage-to-megalith company that he built over the years. No one takes this guy lightly, and his business regularly makes international news almost with every acquisition, quarterly report, product announcement, and, most recently, search for additional office space.
"Most things we want, we don't get, and the rest go somewhere else. But what we do get, is only what we need regardless of extravagance." - Dwight Mann
Nile, LLC (considering that Mann is a Bezos synecdoche, if you put a little bit of thought into it, you'll guess that it is a nomen à clef of Amazon.com, Inc. [AMZN]) is looking to expand to accommodate its rapid growth. And by 'expansion', we mean construct a second headquarters. Already headquartered in Portsmith, Oregon, the firm is bent on planting new roots on the East Coast of the United States. After a three year bidding war between major cities (ie. New York City, Baltimore, Boston, etc.), Brandywine was declared the winner. One might think that because Brandywine is America's poorest big city[p], Dwight Mann would seize this opportunity to make a very public altruistic splash for uplifting American hardship, but nope. He's not a philanthropist, and I doubt that he ever will be. His angle in this is all business; his business.
Being in cargo shipping, Nile is hoping to land some major government contracts where Washington is concerned in order to keep its freight division active overseas. Brandywine is a proxy that offers interesting ports at affordable prices (since the U.S. Navy abandoned the dock -- which is actually not entirely true, but works well in Easter's fictional storyline). To acquire it, lots of back door deals had to be made using the mysterious pseudonym "Mr. Alphabet", as prices undoubtedly would have rocketed had sellers known who the buyer actually was if the truth came to light. Instead, to preserve the deal (which involves a very, very large investment in the City over a five-year period), favors were called in by some unscrupulous individuals, as you can imagine.
/// To me, this is kind of reminiscent of the actions Walt Disney took in the 1960s to quietly purchase up grove land in central Florida in what would become Walt Disney World.