• Jeff Bezos congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the presidential election.

• They have exchanged many barbs over the years.

• Here is a history of the relationship between Bezos and Trump.

Wednesday, Jeff Bezos congratulated Donald Trump on “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” in the 2024 presidential election, wishing the president-elect “all the best in leading and unifying the America we all love.”

Following the attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania rally in July 2024, Bezos broke a nearly nine-month hiatus from Xformerly known as Twitter, to write: “Our former president showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire this evening. 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 wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton or refuse to accept defeat in this election. “erodes our democracy at the edges.”

“One of the things that makes this country amazing is that we are allowed to criticize and scrutinize our elected leaders,” Bezos said at the time.

“An appropriate thing a presidential candidate should do is say, ‘I’m running for the highest office in the world, please consider me,’” he continued. “That’s not what we’ve seen. Trying to dissuade the media and threatening retaliation, which he has done in a number of cases, that’s just not appropriate.”

After Trump’s election that year, Bezos was one of several tech executives who met with the president-elect during a summit that Bezos later called “very productive.” Introducing himself at the meeting, Bezos added that he was “super excited about the possibilities that the innovation administration could bring.”

Trump and Amazon

Campaigning for the 2016 presidential election, Trump said Amazon would have ‘such problems’ if he became president.

In 2017, he tweeted that the company was “causing great damage to tax-paying retailers” and that “cities and states across the United States were being affected.”

He reiterated similar sentiments the following year, saying that Amazon was pushing small retailers out of business.

Trump has also repeatedly stated that Amazon should pay more for USPS deliveries.

“Why is the United States Postal Service, which loses several billion dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Postal Service dumber and poorer? ” he tweeted in 2017. “I should charge A LOT MORE!” »

In 2019, Amazon filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Defense Department’s decision to award Microsoft a $10 billion contract to move sensitive data to a cloud server rather than Amazon Web Services.

The company said in the complaint that Trump influenced the decision to “pursue his own personal and political goals” and harm Bezos, “his perceived political enemy.” Amazon said Trump launched “repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company and Bezos, who was still CEO at the time.

In 2021, the Ministry of Defense 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) capable of meeting the Department’s requirements.”

Trump and the Washington Post

Trump has repeatedly criticized The Washington Postwhich Bezos owns.

In 2019, Trump criticized Bezos and the Post when he appeared to discuss Bezos’ divorce from MacKenzie Scott.

“I am sorry to hear the news of Jeff Bozo’s removal by a competitor whose reporting, I believe, is far more accurate than that of his lobbying newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post,” Trump wrote on X. I hope the newspaper will soon be placed in better and more responsible hands!

For the first time in decades, the newspaper did not publish support for a 2024 presidential candidate. Bezos reportedly intervened to block support for Kamala Harris which had already been written.

Bezos later wrote an op-ed defending the newspaper’s decision to refuse to endorse him, saying the endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “do nothing to tip the scales of an election.”

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