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Jeff Bezos congratulated Donald Trump on winning the presidential election.
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They’ve traded a lot of barbs over the years.
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Here’s a history of the relationship between Bezos and Trump.
On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos congratulated Donald Trump on “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” in the 2024 presidential election, wishing the newly elected president “every success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
Following the assassination attempt on Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024, Bezos broke a nearly nine-month hiatus on X, formerly known as Twitter, writing: “Our former president showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight. So grateful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families.”
The billionaire Amazon founder and Trump have been controversial at times. In 2016, Bezos said Trump had a desire to lock up Hillary Clinton or refuse to accept a loss in that election “our democracy is eroding at the edges.”
“One of the things that makes this country as great as it is is that we get to criticize and scrutinize our elected leaders,” Bezos said at the time.
“What a presidential candidate might appropriately do is say, ‘I’m running for the highest office in the world, please examine me,’” he continued. “That’s not what we’ve seen. Trying to calm the media down and threatening retaliation and retaliation, which he has done in a number of cases, is just not appropriate.”
After Trump’s election that year Bezos was one of several technology leaders who met with the president-elect at a summit later described Bezos as “very productive”. While introducing himself at the meeting, Bezos added that he was “super excited about the possibilities that this could be the Innovation Administration.”
Trump and Amazon
While campaigning for the 2016 presidential election, Trump said Amazon would have “problems like that” if he became president.
In 2017, he tweeted that the company is “wreaking havoc on taxpaying retailers” and “harming cities and states across the US.”
The following year, he echoed similar sentiments, saying Amazon was putting smaller retailers out of business.
Trump has also said several times that Amazon should pay more for USPS deliveries.
“Why is the U.S. Post Office losing many billions of dollars a year while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer?” he tweeted in 2017. “Should charge MUCH MORE!”
In 2019, Amazon filed a federal complaint challenging the Defense Department’s decision to award Microsoft a $10 billion contract to move sensitive data to a cloud server instead of Amazon Web Services.
The company said in the complaint that Trump influenced the decision to “pursue his own personal and political goals” and to harm Bezos, “his alleged political enemy.” Amazon said Trump made “repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” on the company and Bezos, who was then CEO.
In 2021, the DoD canceled the contract with Microsoft and announced a multi-vendor contract to solicit proposals from Microsoft and AWS as “the only Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that can meet the Department’s requirements.”
Trump and The Washington Post
Trump has repeatedly criticized The Washington Post, which Bezos owns.
In 2019, Trump slammed Bezos and the Post when he appeared to discuss Bezos’ divorce from MacKenzie Scott.
“I am so sorry to hear that Jeff Bozo has been taken out by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbying paper, the Amazon Washington Post,” Trump wrote on X. “Hopefully the paper will too doing. soon be placed in better and more responsible hands!”
For the first time in decades, the newspaper did not publish a statement of support for a presidential candidate in 2024. Bezos is said to have intervened to block an already drafted statement of support for Kamala Harris.
Bezos later wrote an op-ed defending the newspaper’s decision not to endorse, saying the endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “do nothing to tip the election.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
