Jeff Bezos launched a volley of praise for Donald Trump Wednesday after courting controversy ahead of the 2024 election by preventing the paper he owns, The Washington Post, from endorsing Kamala Harris.
“I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly, because we knew there would be blowback, and we did the right thing anyway,” he said at The New York Times’ DealBook conference in New York while in conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Bezos declared himself, “very optimistic this time around” about Trump’s mooted plan to cut regulation across the American economy, and credited him with having “grown” since 2016.
“I am very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda. And I think he has a good chance of succeeding,” he said. “If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country. This country is so set up to grow.”
When Sorkin mentioned that Trump appears to hate the press, not least the paper he owns, Bezos said: “I’m going to try to talk him out of that idea. I don’t think the press is the enemy. You know, you’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to Sorkin. “He has too.”
Bezos sounded a similarly positive stance towards Elon Musk, his long-time rival in the billionaire space race, saying: “I take at face value what has been said [by Musk], that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors.
“I could be wrong about that, but I think it could be true.” The founder of one of the world’s most powerful and famously relentless companies added improbably: “I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I’ve very rarely been taken advantage of as a result.”
Sam Altman of OpenAI expressed a similar hope about Musk earlier in the day at DealBook, the preeminent public gathering of America’s power elite, which featured Ken Griffin, Bill Clinton, Jay Powell, Alex Cooper, Sunder Pichai, and others before Bezos’ closing session.
Much of the blowback to Bezos’ decision not to endorse presidential candidates any more came from the paper’s journalists, as well as former editor Marty Baron, with whom Jeff Bezos worked closely for almost a decade after buying the paper in 2013.
The Post’s often-absent owner reiterated his sense of conviction over the decision—which cost the paper more than 10 per cent of its subscriber base—with a Freudian slip: “You can’t do the wrong thing because you’re worried about bad PR… this was the right decision.”
Bezos, dressed in dark suede loafers and a thin black sweater, dealt briskly with the concerns of his staff, describing himself as the Post’s “doting parent.”
“I’m a terrible owner of the Post from the point of view of appearance of conflict,” he said, referring to rumors that he curtailed the Post in order to advantage Amazon and Blue Origin, his space company—both of which compete for government contracts.
But, he added, “the advantage I bring to the Post is [that] when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m the doting parent,” he said to the amusement of the audience at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.
He promised to save the Post for “a second time”, revealing that the paper made money for six or seven years throughout the late 2010s until the “Trump Bump” from his initial election unwound and losses mounted.
And he pointed to collapsing trust in the media across surveys in defense of his decision. “The media has been going down in those surveys for decades. The small positive is that they were always above Congress. This year they lost even that, falling below Congress, which is not easy to achieve. Congress was thrilled, by the way,” Bezos said.
Bezos soon moved onto other subjects—space, AI, the rhythms of his working day. The mismatch between his current interests and the traditional concerns of the Post only becoming more apparent as he did so.
He spoke of the inevitability of being misunderstood as a public figure, and cast his time as the world’s richest man (as he once was) as more of an albatross than an achievement.
There were two lists, Bezos said, on which he would actually like to rank highly: the world’s best inventors, and a ranking of those who have created the most value over time for other people. He has made around $200bn from Amazon, which means he has made $2.1 trillion for others. (Amazon is valued at $2.3tr.)
He sees more value ahead. “I think it’s going to be the best business I’ve ever been involved in,” he said of Blue Origin, telling an amazed Sorkin that he thought the company—which has been outclassed by Musk’s Space X for two decades—would one day be bigger than Amazon.
