Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, on Wednesday congratulated President-elect Donald J. Trump on his victory, a sign of a potential thawing between Mr. Trump and the billionaire tech mogul.
“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Mr. Bezos posted on the social media platform X. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
Mr. Bezos’s fraught relationship with Mr. Trump has come under scrutiny in recent weeks after his decision to end The Washington Post’s tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. The Post was set to endorse Mr. Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The decision prompted immediate blowback at The Post, causing several opinion staff members to step down from their positions on the editorial board, setting off a wave of subscriber cancellations and drawing a rare rebuke from the legendary Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Mr. Bezos defended the decision last week in an essay published by The Post, citing declining trust in news organizations as the primary reason for his decision and rejecting critics who said he was trying to curry favor with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bezos has been at odds with Mr. Trump in recent years. The president-elect has been openly hostile to Mr. Bezos on social media, and Amazon sued the Trump administration in 2019, blaming Mr. Trump’s animosity toward Mr. Bezos for its loss of a $10 billion cloud computing contract.
In 2017, the two dined together at the White House, an occasion Mr. Trump used to criticize The Post’s coverage of his administration. Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Post, wrote in his 2023 book, “Collision of Power,” that during the White House dinner, The Post was atop Mr. Trump’s grievance list.
“We were awful, he said repeatedly,” Mr. Baron wrote. “We treated him unfairly. And with every such utterance, he would poke me in the shoulder with his left elbow.”
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