Bezos 2.0
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And be sure to follow Smart Travel from NerdWallet so you can start traveling like a pro. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. David Maraniss started his career at The Washington Post in 1977. Ben Bradley was the editor.

Within a year, I was working with Bob Woodward, who was becoming the Metro editor. I covered Maryland politics to start with.

Since then, David won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Bill Clinton, wrote a ton of newspaper stories, and 13 books. One of those, about the Vietnam War, was also a Pulitzer finalist. What I'm getting at here is that to people like me, he's a legend. And he worked at the Post at a particularly legendary time, not long after the Post storied coverage of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. You had a sense of

integrity, journalistic ethics, and a desire to seek the truth wherever that truth was. And so every day that I worked there, I was psyched for it. So, you know, everything about the Post was something that I was proud of in that era.

These days, David mostly writes books. He took a buyout from The Post roughly 20 years ago, but remained affiliated with it. He'd come back to cover presidential elections, political conventions, sometimes sports. Your last Washington Post byline is from November 7th of last year. I want to talk about last fall. In October...

Editorial writers at The Post were putting together their endorsement package in support of Vice President Harris. And then it gets killed. What did you know at the time? I was actually at a library at Notre Dame doing research for my next book and took a break. I was somewhere with my wife who does research with me. And she said I had a look on my face like someone had died when I saw it on the cell phone.

What he saw was that the paper's owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had personally made the decision. You know, there's a notion that, of course, an owner has the right to dictate what a newspaper will be. And I think on one level, I understand that. But on a deeper level, I reject it. I think that the Post is a public trust and it has authority.

A reputation that goes beyond who the owner is at any one time. A reputation that has faltered. More than 300,000 subscriptions were canceled after the endorsement was pulled. Another 75,000 digital subscriptions were canceled when Bezos announced late last month that he would overhaul the Post's opinion page to support, quote, personal liberties and free markets.

When he saw that, David walked away from a 48-year affiliation with the Post. First of all, I have no idea what personal liberties they would apply to. But secondly, this is at a moment when the only laser focus of any newspaper that believes in the First Amendment and freedom of the press and democracy is

should be a laser daily focus on the daily destruction of democracy. That's what the editorial page, that's what the entire newspaper should be doing now. There's nothing else going on. That's it. We're in danger of losing our democracy. To be clear, David has never met Jeff Bezos, and he still loves the news side of the paper. But he doesn't recognize the institution he came up in.

The Washington Post historically has held power to account. I mean, that is the thing that the paper is most famous for. Does this episode tell you about whether Jeff Bezos views that as the role of the paper? I don't think he does. You know, every reporter who works for the Washington Post believes in that, but the owner doesn't, and that's the difference. And I don't think the publisher does either. So the two top people,

don't believe in that. They believe in accommodation. They believe in genuflecting to power. And that's intolerable. And at this moment, it's especially dangerous. Today on the show, how and why Jeff Bezos went from saying Donald Trump was eroding democracy to standing by him on Inauguration Day. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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If you want to understand Jeff Bezos now, you have to remember what the first Trump administration was like for him. It was four years of nonstop vitriol from Donald Trump to Bezos and his companies. It was probably one of the most painful relationships in corporate America. That's Dana Marioli, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Everything War, Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power.

I would say one of the biggest issues that Trump took with Bezos himself was his ownership of The Washington Post. He viewed that newspaper's coverage as politically motivated, and he really spoke about it any chance he could. He then would attach...

Bezos' ownership to the Washington Post, to his other companies, and used that as a vehicle to attack Amazon in particular. He would say that the Washington Post was a lobbying arm of Amazon's. And there's a scene in my book that I think was like really telling it into Donald Trump's psyche as it related to that newspaper. People told me

Trump couldn't envision a newspaper owner not using his newspaper to attack enemies. And that's exactly what he thinks that Bezos was doing with the Post. Funnily enough, at the time, Bezos was really not at all involved in editorial decisions. And there was this really stressful dinner that I report on in the book at the White House where Donald invites Bezos and a few other senior Washington Post editors there to

It's in 2017. Trump complained the entire time about the Washington Post coverage of him. He basically petitioned Bezos to intervene. And he said, you know, if I owned a newspaper, I would just make the sort of coverage I dislike disappear. Make it stop. Bezos did not and stood behind the paper and its editor at the time, Marty Barron.

But Bezos also knew that the Post had the potential to make life more difficult for the rest of his businesses. He referred to the Post as the complexifier. Anthony Scaramucci actually had told me that his first day working for Trump in the White House in 2017, Trump called him into the office.

And said, you were a lawyer. You took antitrust. Can we break Amazon up? I hate that son of a bitch, Jeff Bezos. And I hate the Washington Post. Wow. Day one, that was his big question for Scaramucci. And in the background, besides the Washington Post, Trump had his billionaire friends in his ear complaining about Amazon.

These are real estate developers, mall owners, businesses that have to go head-to-head with the company that were saying, this is a monopoly. You need to intervene. And I actually was able to receive a white paper that one of his good friends, Nelson Peltz, the hedge fund manager and billionaire, published.

his firm put together. He sent it to Donald Trump saying, Amazon is monopoly. During your first term, you need to break them up. So he was hearing it from lots of different sides. You know, it's so funny in getting ready to talk to you. My producer and I were looking at

actually a story that the Post put together back in 2018 that showed how the Washington Post would write a story that was critical of Trump policy, and then Trump would tweet, the fake news Washington Post, Amazon's chief lobbyist, has another of many phony headlines. Like, you could almost one for one see story, angry tweet, story, angry tweet, and

That there was no, as you're describing, no separation between what is Amazon, what's the Washington Post, what's Blue Origin, that they were all just sort of lumped together under this Jeff Bezos umbrella. That's exactly right. And it got so contentious that at a certain point, Amazon alleged that Trump intervened and blocked their cloud computing arm from getting a $10 billion government contract because of Bezos' post ownership and filed a lawsuit over this.

Like it got really, really ugly. They thought they were losing business from it. You know, Trump also opened an investigation to see if Amazon was exploiting the postal service on its deliveries. So there was a lot of tension those four years. How much of this would you say was vitriol because of business and how much of this was personal? Is there a way to separate those out?

That's a good question. You know, there are other people that told me when I was reporting out the book that part of it was also motivated possibly by jealousy. At the time of Trump's first term, Bezos was the richest man in the world. Trump had obviously gone through bankruptcies that had been reported on. So people in his, you know, in his cabinet had told me that. So I think there's a lot of things that contributed to this. But I think The Washington Post was a particular sticking point. There was also another, well, complexifier.

In the fall of 2017, Amazon announced it was hunting for a home for its new headquarters called HQ2. State and city leaders fell all over themselves to offer the right blend of deal sweeteners to win the contract. In the end, HQ2 ended up in suburban Virginia, essentially Washington's backyard. And it cemented Bezos' new stature as a D.C. player.

Well, what we saw from Amazon is for a very, very, very long time, Bezos himself and the company ignored Washington, D.C. They did not do a lot of lobbying. There's sort of this upstart mentality there where they thought that they were David versus Goliath in that battle, but

And what we've seen more recently is that they've really had to dedicate themselves to the traditional, you know, Washington infrastructure, lobbying, the money that comes along with that. And they're one of the biggest spenders now when it relates to lobbying dollars. They have a very big team in D.C. And I think HQ2 was also part of that. You know, they headquartered one of the locations there.

right in D.C.'s backyard in Virginia. That's a way for them to interact with people on the Hill more regularly. It means that you're creating jobs in the backyard of all of these politicians. You're able to dedicate more to lobbying. So I think that was fairly calculated, but it came a lot later than a lot of other companies of their size. I want to talk about this party in 2020. Bezos,

buys a home in D.C., he's got this big party at his D.C. mansion, and you've got Bill Gates, Ben Stiller, but also Kellyanne Conway, Mitt Romney, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump. Tell me the story of this party, because it feels like a key moment.

This is his stepping out party. As people joked around, they said the Amazon embassy is open when he opens it up for this party after the Alfalfa Club dinner, which is like a very prestigious event in D.C., invite only. It's a who's who. And he hosts the unofficial, very exclusive after party at his home. And what we saw is that Jeff, over the last few years, starting around that time, really did woo people in Trump's inner circle, specifically Ivanka and Jared. Yeah.

They've been seen having dinners together in Miami. He lived very close to them when they were in D.C. And he's made a real effort with them. And it was funny because Trump apparently was not very happy that people from his team were at this party. Did it create a thaw or was it just sort of like a tiny inroad? I think at that time it was an inroad. But I spoke to people in Trump's inner circle at that time that went to the party who said that they found Jeff Charming.

After the break, how the Biden administration helped turn Jeff Bezos toward Trump 2.0. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help find you options within your budget.

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Then, of course, Biden wins in 2020. And later that year, Bezos posts on Instagram, unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era. He goes on to congratulate Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. The American people proved again that our democracy is strong.

And this seems to put Bezos in an interesting position because he's obviously saying Biden won the election. He's not buying in to Trump's narrative. But his businesses are also kind of a target for the Biden administration, which starts to go pretty hard after big companies, big tech and Amazon. How did Bezos try to align his suite of businesses in the Biden administration?

It's actually really ironic. When Biden won, there was such a sigh of relief at Amazon. They thought, finally, this four years is over. We have someone in the White House who we're ostensibly close to at the time. The head of government relations and PR at Amazon was this man named Jay Carney, who was Biden's spokesperson when he was VP and Obama's spokesperson when he was president. So they thought they had all of these inroads.

And it wound up being an even more painful four years than the Trump years. There was less vitriol and rhetoric on Twitter. But behind the scenes, there were policy changes that were really, really detrimental to Amazon. And they get sued.

They get sued for being a monopoly. But not only that, you know, Biden was, he ran on being notoriously pro-union. One of the biggest anti-union companies in this country is Amazon. And that made them a constant target of his administration as it related to labor practices. It also meant that Jeff was very much iced out of the president's roundtables and never really got invites to much. His advice was not solicited by this company.

It became very, very contentious. When you say that, it reminds me of Elon Musk not being invited to an electric vehicle summit in the Biden administration and how motivating that was for him in his antipathy toward Joe Biden.

Completely. Was it similarly motivating for Bezos, do you think, not being consulted and also having the sort of rhetoric of the Biden administration be so pro-union and so kind of aggressively anti-corporate in their words?

I don't have the same lens into Bezos' psyche as we do on Elon's in the same way. But I could tell you that Bezos and his most senior team of people at Amazon thought that there was not another company in history at this period that received such hostility from lawmakers as Amazon during Biden's term. You know, he also put Lena Kahn, who had risen to fame writing a law review article saying that Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up.

As the head of the FTC, he espoused this view of antitrust that could really hurt Amazon. It was really a tough four years for them there as well. And even though it was like less on the surface, you couldn't tell from nasty tweets. There wasn't like this sort of open vitriol. Behind the scenes, it was pretty icy. There's this tweet from May of 2022. Then President Biden says, you want to bring down inflation? Let's make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.

It doesn't mention Amazon. Bezos responds, the newly created disinformation board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new non-sequitur board instead. This is all about raising corporate taxes. And it's just so interesting to me that like there's this little Twitter war happening. Like clearly there's a lot of policy stuff going on, but also it feels like some feathers are getting ruffled.

That's completely true. Bezos and his team were upset that Biden kept inviting Doug McMillan, the Walmart CEO, to these White House roundtables, but not them, even though they're a very big employer, a very big source of GDP. And there's a scene in my book where

where an Amazon executive speaks to someone very senior in the White House and says, what's going on? Why are we not invited? And the person references that tweet you just said and says, you know, it's really difficult to have conversations with someone who's out there kicking the shit out of you publicly on Twitter. You know, it's very hard to pick up the phone and have a candid conversation. That's your public posture.

But behind the scenes, Amazon had a lot of pent-up aggression and anger at the Biden administration, too. And that sort of, you see that come to a boil. And Amazon also learns that Biden and his team view Amazon as too toxic to touch. That's the exact term. That because of their anti-labor union practices, because of Bezos' inflated pay compared to his average worker and stuff like that, they were persona non grata at the White House.

And that was a sting for them. It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment in which Bezos seemed to shift to Team Trump. But throughout the spring and summer of 2024, many Silicon Valley CEOs seemed to drift in that direction. Then came October and the post-endorsement fiasco. Just days after Trump's win, Bezos was interviewed at the New York Times Dealbook conference and said he was optimistic about a second term. I'm very hopeful about his...

he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I'm going to help him. What about the idea that he thinks that the press is the enemy? Well, I think he, I'm going to try to talk him out of that idea. I don't think the press is the enemy. I think it's worth laying out what businesses Jeff Bezos has that are regulated by the government, that are in front of the government right now, that touch the federal government in any way.

Yeah, well, the first one's Amazon, which is obviously the biggest retailer in the world. It's the subject of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit.

where they've been accused of being a monopoly that will go to trial next year. But it also interacts with the government in many ways as a vendor, not only on the cloud computing side, where it's the vendor for the CIA and other major agencies, and it gets government contracts, but it also sells the government lots of things like office supplies and toilet paper and things like that, right?

And then on the aerospace side of this, Jeff Bezos founded a company called Blue Origin that competes head-to-head with Elon Musk's SpaceX. This is all about sending people to space. And

I would say seeing Elon Musk get so close to the president during those final months of the election and now in office was rattling for people at Blue Origin to see their biggest, most fiercest competitor that they're going to go head to head with on contracts, federal contracts in the Oval Office is something that they had to consider as well. I want to talk about two Amazon projects here. One is the documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump.

You guys broke the news, I believe, of her pay package for this, right? Amazon's paying some $40 million, but she'll take home, what, $28 million? At least. It's more than 70% of that. And then earlier this month, Amazon announced that it would start streaming The Apprentice. How do you read that move?

I mean, it was very interesting that they decided to do this now and not during Trump 1.0. You could see there, I mean, more than half the country voted for Donald Trump. So there's definitely an audience base. So there could be a real like rational business decision here, right? I think what everyone is trying to figure out is what the economics of that look like for Donald Trump.

When he made that series with his producer, he had sort of an unusual contract where he had a lot of the financial upside in a way that most stars of TV shows didn't. And I think that the question is how much of this streaming package will, or if any of it, will go to Donald Trump. Do we know? We don't know. Because it does seem...

on its face like a way to curry favor with the administration. And it also seems like a smart business decision, as you're saying, like many people did vote for President Trump and probably want to see The Apprentice again. That's right. It was a hit television show at the time, which I think a lot of people forget. You know, what every reporter is trying to figure out right now is what the economics look like. If this is another, you know, Melania Trump documentary deal sort of situation. Yeah.

You know, we have talked about Elon Musk. We've talked about Mark Zuckerberg. One of the things that we've looked into a lot on this show is trying to parse out what is business and what is belief, personal philosophy. Like, how much of this is someone saying, hey, I have employees and I have customers and I have a duty to try to maximize the profit of my corporation. And how much of this is, I like this guy and I believe what he's saying.

In terms of your reporting, do you have any way to parse out what's what? It's hard for us to know what's going on in the brains of these CEOs. What I could say is that there was a marked difference when you look at Donald Trump's inauguration just this past December versus his first one or versus other presidential inaugurations. This was the hottest ticket in CEO suites in corporate America. People were throwing $1 million checks at his inauguration funds.

to try to get a seat at the table to show that they were, you know, optimistic about this presidency to the point where they ran out of space. And we did not see this level of interest for Biden. We did not see this level of interest for Trump 1.0. We did not see this level of interest for Obama. So it seems like, you know, especially with these very high profile inaugural donations earlier on in the cycle, which we broke, like the Bezos one, the Zuckerberg one,

that corporate America took note and said, we have to be there. And that's definitely a market difference. It's unclear what Jeff Bezos and other big tech CEOs might get from this administration. But on Tuesday, President Trump moved to fire the two Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission. Those firings will be challenged in court.

Also on Tuesday, the FTC removed four years of business guidance blogs from its website. That includes blogs critical of Amazon. And the president's nominee to run the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is a former Amazon executive. Amazon has long been subjected to OSHA scrutiny over safety in its warehouses. I think it's safe to say that the Jeff Bezos of 2025...

acts, talks, looks different than the Jeff Bezos of 2013, 2015. When you talk to people within the company and around him, does Bezos seem all in on the Trump team? Does he now seem confident that the pivot that he has made is the right one?

When I speak to people who are really close to him at senior levels at Amazon, for instance, they're really curious about his new public stance. They don't know how much of this is self-preservation because of his businesses relying on government contracts and the likes because of the Biden administration, you know, not being great to them versus how much of this is like a real ideological change. Dana, thank you so much for talking with me. Thanks for having me. This is really fun.

Dana Mattioli is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Everything War, Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power.

Special thanks to David Maraniss. We reached out to Amazon for comment and did not hear back by recording time. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. Slate is led by Hilary Fry. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the best way to support our independent billionaire-free journalism is to join Slate Plus. You get a free copy of the show

You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, including this one, as well as access to The Discourse, our bonus series, plus some other nice bonuses too, like never hitting a paywall on the Slate site. All right, we'll be back next week with more shows. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.

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Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories. About campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes. About audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is, Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years.

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