Donald Trump today met with executives at Blue Origin—the space company owned and operated by Jeff Bezos.
Trump met with David Limp, the company’s CEO, and Megan Mitchell, its vice president of government relations, after an early afternoon press conference on “border security and migrant crime” held by Trump in Austin, Texas, at Million Air, a private aircraft terminal housed within Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
The moment was captured by Alex Brandon, a staff photographer for Associated Press, who first reported the news.
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The meeting comes on the same day that The Washington Post—also owned by Jeff Bezos—killed a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris written by The Post’s editorial board. The paper reported that Bezos himself had nixed the endorsement.
The decision has outraged much of The Post newsroom, as well as journalists across the industry.
Blue Origin has struggled for relevance in the fight to reach space. The company has become Bezos’ primary preoccupation since he stepped down from day-to-day management of Amazon in 2021, as he told the podcaster Lex Fridman in December.
“I wanted to come in and Blue Origin needs me right now,” he said then. “I turned the CEO role [at Amazon] over, and the primary reason I did that is that I could spend time on Blue Origin, adding some energy, some sense of urgency—we need to move much faster and we’re going to.”
Bezos did not leave Amazon to spend more time on The Washington Post, the paper he bought for $250m in 2013. The Post is in a fight for relevance with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—as well as many new media competitors in D.C.—but Bezos is in a much bigger fight for relevance: the fight for space, where he has long been losing to Elon Musk, the founder of Space X and one of only two men in the world who are richer than him.
The Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, writing then that Trump had “shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world.”
Bezos suffered for that forthright stance after Trump won the presidency. The Trump administration awarded a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract to Microsoft rather than Amazon in a move that was widely seen as politically motivated and was later canceled by the Biden administration.
The Post’s absentee proprietor does not, it appears, wish to be put in such a situation again.
