Does Jeff Bezos fear President-elect Donald J. Trump? Quite the contrary.
Mr. Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder, who also owns The Washington Post, offered his most extensive comments to date about Mr. Trump’s return to power at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday. He praised Mr. Trump’s deregulatory agenda, and the leadership of Elon Musk, who is set to be the president-elect’s partner in cost-cutting.
“I’m very hopeful — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation,” Mr. Bezos said of Mr. Trump. “And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.”
Mr. Bezos’s views on the president elect have been repeated by other DealBook Summit speakers, including Kenneth Griffin of Citadel.
Mr. Bezos fought plenty with Mr. Trump from 2016 to 2020 over everything from headlines in The Post to Amazon’s tax payments. But Mr. Bezos said he believed that Mr. Trump had “grown” over the past eight years.
“What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled,” he said.
Mr. Bezos has generally espoused a centrist political ideology, although he has taken pains to avoid being politically outspoken. Many business leaders at the event evinced a similar optimism about what a Trump presidency could mean for everything from deal activity to tax cuts. But Mr. Bezos’s comments were still somewhat striking given his well-known tensions with Mr. Trump for much of his first term.
Mr. Bezos has also fought with Mr. Musk. But the tech mogul said he welcomed the involvement of the Tesla founder in Mr. Trump’s administration. He said he took Mr. Musk “at face value” and did not think Mr. Musk would try to punish his enemies, or help himself with his access to the president elect. He called Mr. Musk’s government-efficiency panel especially promising.
“I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical — and I very rarely have been taken advantage of as a result,” he said, continuing his optimistic streak. “Why be cynical about that?”
One “complexifier” in his life, as he has called it, is The Post. The newspaper, which he paid $250 million for in 2013, has struggled in recent years, shedding subscribers and losing money. And Mr. Bezos was intensely criticized for his decision to end the paper’s decades-long practice of endorsing a candidate just days before the election, even as the editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. (Readers voted with their feet: Some 250,000 canceled their subscriptions.)
“I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly,” Mr. Bezos said. He pushed back on the suggestion that he was kowtowing to Mr. Trump by pulling the endorsement, saying, “The Post covers all presidents very aggressively and is going to continue to cover all presidents very aggressively.”
Even a president that frequently smears the national media as the enemy?
“I’m going to try to talk him out of that idea,” Mr. Bezos said. “I don’t think the press is the enemy.”
He was coy on how he planned to fix The Post’s woes, saying only that he had “a bunch of ideas.”
Perhaps Mr. Bezos’s biggest vulnerability in a new administration is his rocket company, Blue Origin, which will compete in the years ahead with Mr. Musk’s SpaceX and a third company for government contracts worth billions. Mr. Bezos was bullish on Blue Origin, saying he felt it could ultimately be bigger than Amazon.
“I think it’s going to be the best business that I’ve ever been involved in,” he said, “but it’s going to take a while.”
Mr. Bezos stepped down from day-to-day control of Amazon in 2021, but he remains the company’s executive chairman. In that role, he said he spent 95 percent of his time focusing on artificial intelligence, a crucial growth area where Amazon has lagged behind Microsoft and Google. At the summit on Wednesday, Mr. Bezos heralded a new A.I. model the company had introduced the day prior, saying it was just as good as rival systems
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