NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he is “optimistic” about President-elect Donald Trump’s second term and expressed some excitement about possible regulatory cuts in coming years.
“I’m actually very optimistic this time,” Bezos said on stage during a wide-ranging interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit in New York. “He seems to have a lot of energy in reducing regulations. If I can help with that, I will help him.”
“We have too many rules in this country,” Bezos added.
The comments follow Bezos’ decision in October to ban The Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate, a move that led to tens of thousands of people canceling their subscriptions and protests from journalists with deep histories with the paper.
At the time, Bezos wrote in a newspaper op-ed that editorial endorsements create a perception of bias at a time when many Americans do not believe the media and do nothing to swing the election.
On Wednesday, he said he would try to talk Trump out of the idea that the press is the enemy.
“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. ‘He did that too. This is not the case. The press is not the enemy.”
Trump had railed against Bezos and his companies, including Amazon and The Washington Post, during his first term. In 2019, Amazon argued in a lawsuit that Trump’s bias against the company hurt its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract. The Biden administration later pursued a contract with both Amazon and Microsoft.
In another part of the interview, Bezos said he does not expect Elon Musk, who has been tasked with easing regulations in the coming Trump era, to use his power to hurt his business competitors. Bezos owns Blue Origin, a competitor of Musk’s SpaceX.
