What a terrible headline. In this case "the same" refers not to the "beauty contest" but to locating offices in an already well-established city. Garbage clickbait.
In Northern Virginia they were pitched the same two locations as Amazon. I have no idea when Amazon did their in person tour of the locations but I know when Apple did because they made sure local TV and print journalists were there to capture them touring the Crystal City location that Amazon ultimately selected. Local papers and TV both had stories about it in their next editions.
Neither of the two sites make any sense for what is mostly going to be a giant call center. Still Apple came and made sure there was plenty of coverage of it. Obviously Apple was playing some sort of PR game.
> Incentives from Texas include as much as $25 million in taxpayer-funded grants, and a 15-year property tax abatement possibly worth tens of millions of dollars
That's literally what Amazon was forcing cities to do to each-other.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-news/amazon-hq...
That is substantially different than a property tax abatement.