For Jeff Bezos and his businesses, Washington has become more important

As president, Donald Trump spent years insulting and threatening Amazon, the e-commerce giant founded by Jeff Bezos. Amazon sometimes hit back, claiming once that the company had been unfairly blocked from a lucrative government contract simply because Trump was angry at Bezos over coverage in the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post.

But in August, weeks after Trump formally secured the GOP nomination, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded Bezos in 2021, sought to establish a friendlier rapport with the former president, introducing himself in a phone call and outlining the company’s plans for the future.

The call concluded with Trump suggesting the company cut a large check for his presidential efforts, according to two people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the private discussion. Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.

Jassy did not agree to make the contribution. But the call itself reflected signs of new engagement between Trump and key figures in the business empire overseen by Bezos, who remains executive chairman of Amazon. CNN first disclosed the existence of the call, but the request for a contribution has not been previously reported.

After Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an attempted assassination at a July campaign rally, Bezos called Trump to say how impressed he was that the candidate had raised his fist after coming under fire, according to a person familiar with that conversation. Last week, executives from Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, spoke briefly to Trump after a campaign stop in Texas. The encounter occurred on the same day that Post leadership announced that the newspaper would not be issuing an endorsement in this year’s presidential race or in future ones.

A Blue Origin spokesman said the meeting with Trump was arranged spontaneously when CEO Dave Limp, who was in Austin to meet with Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas), learned that he would be departing from the same airport where the candidate was holding a rally. A Trump campaign spokeswoman said, “Business leaders across the country support President Trump because they know he’s a businessman with a proven track record of economic success from his first term in the White House.”

Spokespeople for Bezos and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

In recent years, Bezos’s interests in Washington have expanded, with the federal government now contracting billions not just to Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary but also to Blue Origin, which is locked in a fierce competition with SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Trump ally Elon Musk. Another Republican megadonor, Larry Ellison, is executive chairman of Oracle, the software company that jockeys with Amazon for major technology contracts.

Amazon’s cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, has grown rapidly since Trump’s term ended. It generated more than half the company’s total profits last quarter, with federal contracts forming a key element of that business. On defense technology alone, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle will compete for up to $8 billion over the next two years to modernize military servers, with the Pentagon expected to ink even more lucrative, long-term contracts under the next president to maintain those systems. Blue Origin is under a $3.4 billion NASA contract for a moon mission set to launch in 2029 and is now able to compete for the next round of national security launch contracts, worth a combined $5.6 billion.

The premium that Amazon places on its relationships in Washington is evident in the more than $15 million the e-commerce giant and its subsidiary, AWS, have spent on federal lobbying so far this year, disclosures show. Lobbying expenditures have risen steadily over the last decade.

For Blue Origin, which says its $10 billion in sales orders is now divided between commercial and government customers, the stakes may be even greater. The next president could face momentous decisions about whether the U.S. government will prioritize travel to the moon, where Bezos’s company is especially focused, or to Mars, a longtime preoccupation of Musk’s. Blue Origin has spent about $2 million on lobbying so far this year, according to disclosures, less than the amount reported by SpaceX under that name and its formal title, Space Exploration Technologies.

“All the most important work at Blue was aimed at some point either in the short term or long term at winning government business,” said a former space industry executive who has worked with Bezos.

Bezos has faced backlash since The Post announced last week that its editorial board would not endorse a candidate in this presidential election or in future ones. Commentators and a deluge of readers who canceled their subscriptions said they saw Bezos as upending a decades-old tradition to protect business interests that could be vulnerable in a second Trump administration.

Bezos, who bought The Post in 2013, explained his decision in a Post op-ed published Monday, arguing that presidential endorsements undermine credibility with readers at a time of declining trust in journalistic institutions. He acknowledged the complexities arising from his dual role as a newspaper owner and a founder of numerous companies with interests in Washington but maintained that he was not acting out of self-interest.

“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” he wrote. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up.”

The Post’s newsroom operates separately from its opinion section, and Martin Baron, a former executive editor who led the newspaper when Trump was in office, has said that Bezos never interfered with news coverage.

On the opinions side, Bezos’s stance on endorsements signals a shift in approach from the two previous elections since he bought the news organization. In both elections, The Post’s editorial page opposed Trump.

In his op-ed, Bezos said he “sighed” when he learned that Trump had met briefly with Blue Origin executives the day The Post announced it would no longer issue presidential endorsements, knowing it would “provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision.” He insisted he had not been aware of the meeting.

Political exposure

Bezos, with an estimated net worth of more than $200 billion, got his start in business three decades ago when he founded Amazon as an online bookstore in his Seattle garage. Today, his wealth still derives in large part from the shares he owns in the company, which is valued at about $2 trillion.

Over the years, he has taken on additional ventures. He founded Blue Origin in 2000. He bought The Post 13 years later. In 2020, he committed $10 billion to fight climate change in a new project called the Bezos Earth Fund.

Unlike many of his wealthy peers, Bezos has largely steered clear of politics. He has not given major sums to candidates, with the exception of $10 million he and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, contributed in 2018 to a centrist super PAC that supports military veterans running for office. In 2022, Bezos publicly sparred with the Biden administration over economic policy, ridiculing the president’s statement on social media that corporate taxes could be used to address inflation. A White House spokesperson responded by suggesting that Bezos was irked that Biden had met in the White House with labor leaders behind Amazon’s unionization drive, which the company has sought to stamp out.

People who have interacted with Bezos describe him as a libertarian who is skeptical of taxes, welfare programs and labor unions. He has expressed strong disagreement, these people said, with certain left-wing politicians, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). He has been especially outspoken about immigration, telling Amazon employees in 2017 that the company would use its lobbying resources to oppose efforts by Trump to bar immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations and, more recently, urging congressional action to protect undocumented young immigrants, known as “dreamers.”

After Trump’s election in 2016, Bezos was thrust into the political spotlight as his businesses came under pressure from a president fixated on Post coverage.

“Arguably no non-media company and its chief executive were assailed by Trump more frequently or savagely than Amazon and Bezos,” Baron, the former Post executive editor, wrote in his 2023 book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.” Still, Baron wrote, Bezos always allowed The Post newsroom to “operate with full independence.”

The former president complained bitterly about Bezos to his advisers and sought to punish his companies out of anger about Post journalism, according to four former administration officials. Trump asked aides about clawing back any benefits that Amazon receives from the U.S. government. He accused Amazon of swindling the U.S. Postal Service, going so far as to create a task force to examine the agency’s finances that eventually concluded that deliveries for Amazon and other retailers were profitable for the Postal Service. He wanted the government to cancel all subscriptions to The Post.

The repercussions for Bezos’s cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, as well as for Blue Origin, played out both publicly and privately.

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In 2018, when the Pentagon began a bidding process for a $10 billion cloud contract, Amazon Web Services was considered a favorite for the award, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI contract.

In April 2019, Amazon and Microsoft were picked to continue competing for the Pentagon award. But that July, Trump told reporters that he was “very seriously” examining what he described as concerns about favoritism toward Amazon, and in August, the Pentagon put the process on hold amid complaints from the president. Defense officials denied being influenced by the White House.

In October, the Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft, prompting a protest from Amazon, which filed a complaint in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Amazon argued that the award process could not be separated from Trump’s “repeatedly expressed determination to, in the words of the President himself, ‘screw Amazon.’”

The complaint cited Trump by name 181 times in arguing that he became increasingly “obsessed” with punishing Bezos. The “seeds of this animus originate with the Washington Post’s coverage of him before he even was elected President,” the complaint read.

During Trump’s last year in office, the Defense Department Inspector General’s office reviewed the matter and said the procurement process had been conducted consistent with applicable law. But the Pentagon watchdog also said it could not rule out White House interference because several potential Defense Department witnesses had been instructed by Pentagon lawyers not to answer questions about whether they had communicated with the White House about the contract.

Meanwhile, it was becoming clear to executives at Blue Origin that the billionaire’s ownership of The Post was also creating friction in their interactions with the Trump administration.

During a meeting in April 2019 between Blue Origin then-CEO Bob Smith and top administration officials to discuss the Pentagon’s space launch contracts, Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, put the company on notice about its reputation inside the White House, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

“You have a Washington Post problem,” Short said, according to the people. Short declined to comment.

Blue Origin executives interpreted his remark as a reaction to a negative editorial in The Post, according to people familiar with their thinking. The Post’s editorial board had panned remarks by Pence at a meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama, and questioned whether the administration’s space ambitions amounted to anything more than political theater.

Senior leaders at Blue Origin viewed Trump as good for the space business, former employees said. He called for a return to the moon, reestablished the National Space Council and directed the Pentagon to create an additional branch of the armed forces focused on space - which became the United States Space Force, founded in 2019. But these same corporate leaders feared that they would pay the price for Trump’s animosity toward Bezos, according to a person familiar with their thinking. One former space industry executive said Bezos was made aware of the concerns but was not intimately involved in responding to them.

Blue Origin leaders went into overdrive to demonstrate their separation from The Post. In January 2020, when the editorial board again criticized the administration’s space policy, Blue Origin executives sought to publish an op-ed outlining the company’s support for the administration’s plans, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, who died in 2021, deemed the proposal too promotional for the company, according to people familiar with the discussions, so executives opted instead for a full-page advertisement, which ran on Feb. 18, 2020.

The advertisement responded directly to The Post’s most recent editorial, saying the commentary reflected “uninformed critiques.” It was signed by Smith, the CEO, and emblazoned with the Blue Origin logo.

Future ambitions

Bezos stepped down from the CEO position at Amazon in July 2021, handing the reins to Jassy and transitioning into the role of executive chairman.

Last year, he moved from Seattle, his home of nearly three decades, to Miami, where he and his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, live on the same exclusive barrier island as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The pair attended Bezos’s 60th birthday party earlier this year, held at a Beverly Hills mansion owned by Bezos, according to news reports and images shared by guests on social media. Also in attendance were prominent celebrities, including Trump critics such as Oprah Winfrey.

The billionaire puts most of his focus now on Blue Origin, according to former space industry executives.

The rocket company is competing against industry leader SpaceX, whose founder, Musk, has poured about $120 million into efforts to elect Trump, according to campaign finance records, while publicly enthusing over a potential high-level role in his next administration, running what the billionaire libertarian has called “The Department of Government Efficiency.”

The rivalry between the two titans - and the two richest people in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index - is defining a new era of commercial space operations that could be influenced significantly by the next president.

Trump’s election in 2016 happened to coincide with a shift at Blue Origin, said a former employee, away from Bezos being willing simply to invest his own money and toward him “expecting that the government is going to fund a lot of these things.” But in terms of securing government business, Musk’s company is far ahead. SpaceX was the first private company to send astronauts to the International Space Station and has pioneered satellite internet technology through its Starlink program. An Amazon project to deploy similar internet satellites, called Project Kuiper, trails far behind.

During a Saturday meeting at Blue Origin’s headquarters in May 2016, Bezos was frustrated that SpaceX had won a $33 million Pentagon contract for the development of its next-generation Raptor engine, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

“Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos said, according to the people. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

In 2021, SpaceX beat out competitors including Blue Origin for a $2.9 billion contract to build a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon. Bezos’s company unsuccessfully protested the contract with the Government Accountability Office and filed litigation claiming that the selection process had been flawed. Last year, Blue Origin separately secured a $3.4 billion contract to build a second lander for NASA’s Artemis campaign. A Blue Origin spokesman said the company aims for a balance between government and commercial customers, with a larger share to date coming from commercial business.

Blue Origin wants to keep NASA focused on lunar exploration, according to two former employees of the Bezos rocket company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal. For his part, Musk is bent on Mars - frequently sporting an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt - and is seen as someone who could use his influence with Trump to direct more federal resources toward exploration of that planet, the former employees said.

A recent guest on Bezos’s yacht told associates there was “non-stop conversation about Elon” and his ambitions in space among Bezos and those in attendance, according to a person told about the conversations.

Back on land, Amazon’s contracts with the federal government remain a driver of one of its fastest growing and most profitable divisions, Amazon Web Services. The day after Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in July 2021, the Defense Department announced it was canceling the disputed JEDI contract to modernize the Defense Department’s computing systems. The Pentagon said the military’s needs had changed since the contract was awarded to Microsoft during the Trump administration and that it would now engage with both Microsoft and Amazon on a new $9 billion package of cloud computing contracts to accomplish the work.

A year later, Amazon beat out Microsoft for a deal with the National Security Agency, reportedly worth $10 billion, solidifying its leading role in managing some of the nation’s most secretive intelligence networks.

Those two companies, in addition to Google and Oracle, are now competing to win components of $9 billion in contracts for the JEDI successor, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. Competition for the bulk of that pie is now in full swing, with roughly $1 billion awarded mostly this year, and Amazon named to some early Navy and Marine Corps work.

John Sherman, who retired this year as the Defense Department’s chief information officer to become dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, said the Joint Warfighting contracts, or JWCC, were seen as a bridge to longer-term contracts managing Defense Department cloud-computing systems. The four companies are like athletes, he said, “pushing each other to get better.”

The jousting among the four for the JWCC work - as well as possibly lengthier, more lucrative follow-ons - will play out under the next president, Sherman said. The victors will then be able to use the government contracts as calling cards to win over additional corporate clients.

Jassy, in announcing the company’s quarterly earnings in August, said Amazon was making progress across a number of fronts “but perhaps none more so” than Amazon Web Services’ growth. AWS accounted for 17 percent of Amazon’s $148 billion in total revenue last quarter but an outsize $9.3 billion, or 63 percent, of its total profits.

As AWS has buoyed the company’s bottom line, helping to push Amazon stock to record highs, Bezos sold roughly $8.5 billion worth of shares in February and in July disclosed plans to sell about $5 billion more. After the sales, he would own nearly 9 percent of the company.

Whether at Amazon or Blue Origin, Bezos has been willing to go toe to toe with the government to defend his business empire’s interests in Washington, noted former employees, who pointed to litigation challenging unfavorable contracting decisions by the government - under Trump as well as Biden.

Bezos was closely involved in the response to losing out on the initial NASA award for the lunar lander in 2021, said a former Blue Origin employee, and the litigation, while unsuccessful, showed he was “not pandering to the customer.”

“With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” said the former employee. “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Davenport is the author of a forthcoming book about Musk, Bezos and NASA’s new space race.