Trump’s Tech Bros: Has Jeff Bezos sold out?

0:00AI can transform a single customer experience. What's hard is making it work everywhere, every interaction, every channel across a global enterprise. That's the difference with NICE, one platform that connects agent to agents, human agents, and customer intelligence across the entire customer experience. So instead of managing disconnected tools, you're delivering experiences that get smarter with every interaction. NICE, the proven CX AI leader. Learn more at NICE.com. This yacht cost$500 million. It can sleep 45 people. It has a support yacht. There's this big mermaid figure on the bow. And it's also kind of old school because it's a sailboat, so it looks kind of like a figure from the past.

0:49Murad Ahmed: That's Anna Nicolau, the FT's US media editor, talking about Jeff Bezos' sailing superyacht. Bezos, founder of Amazon and rocket maker Blue Origin, had just been crowned richest man in the world. And what does anyone do when they become the wealthiest person on the planet? They buy a yacht. It's become kind of this symbol of his newfound lavish persona in recent years. The other status symbol to complement his newfound lavish persona? Buy a newspaper. And not just any paper. How about the Washington Post? Bezos bought the Post at a time when the Post was really kind of struggling. So people, I think, were initially pretty excited about it because obviously, you know, Bezos has capacity to invest.

1:33People were feeling pretty good and optimistic. Well, I think he spent more on the yacht than he spent on The Post, by the way.

1:39Murad Ahmed: So says Marty Barron, the legendary former editor of The Washington Post, who was helming the paper when Bezos bought it. The Post was$250 million, and as I recall, his yacht was about$500 million. In buying The Post, Bezos was buying an American institution, the newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers and helped to bring down President Nixon. It was a paper of record, respected by politicians and policymakers, and it wasn't afraid to speak truth to power. Shortly after buying the post, Bezos helped give the paper a catchy new tagline, Democracy Dies in Darkness. I actually think he did believe in the role of the press.

2:17He did believe that it's an important institution. He is kind of idealistic about American democracy, or I would say he was.

2:24Murad Ahmed: Today, that idealism seems to be in question. Once a sworn enemy, Bezos has become an ally to Donald Trump. So in this episode, why did Jeff Bezos change his mind about Trump? And what does that mean for The Washington Post and the future of American media?

2:50Murad Ahmed: This is Tectonic from The Financial Times. I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. And in this season of the podcast, I'm exploring the relationships between Donald Trump and some of the titans of the tech world. What's really driving those relationships? How they are playing out? And what might they mean for the future of the tech industry in the US and around the world? In this episode, me and Anna Nikolaos speak to Marty Barron for his unique perspective on Jeff Bezos, what he saw of the Bezos-Trump relationship, and to understand how Trump is reshaping the American media landscape.

3:29Murad Ahmed: I started by asking Anna about Bezos and Trump's relationship during the president's first term. It was quite contentious. Bezos fought with Trump a lot. Trump was really quite aggressive towards Bezos because he was the owner of the Washington Post. and for Trump, that made him an enemy. It really seemed to be that simple. President Trump going after Amazon again, this time in a series of tweets. He writes so many stories about me and the Washington Post are fake news. This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise. He's using the Washington Post for power.

4:06Donald Trump can't stand Jeff Bezos. He's complained about him to everybody, including me. As we know at this point, Like Trump is all about retribution on his enemies. So he would be calling Bezos names. He would interfere on commercial things. Kind of everyone we've spoken to said that that had a huge impact on Bezos, really got into his head. So there was a lot of back and forth during that first term.

4:32Murad Ahmed: Right. Trump's nickname for him was Jeff Bozo, for example. And that language seems to have gone away in the second term. Yeah. And I think it's probably worth noting that this wasn't the case just for Bezos. and it seems really foreign now almost. But at the time, for a lot of the big CEOs in America, and Trump himself has made a lot of comments like this saying, you know, people didn't used to like me and now they all love me. It was really actually pretty standard during his first term. We saw a lot of the bigger people in corporate America would, you know, they didn't really speak in favor of Trump at all.

5:03And now we see them all kind of getting in line.

5:05Murad Ahmed: Marty, to come to you, let's go back more than a decade now when Bezos bought the Post just before Trump's first term back in 2013 from his friend Don Graham. And the Grahams were an institution in D.C. and across the American media. Why do you think Bezos wanted to buy it in the first place? Well, there was a huge surprise, of course. The Graham family had owned the Post for 80 years. Nobody expected that they would sell the Post. There was concern, of course. Nobody had any idea why Jeff Bezos was acquiring the Post, what he intended to do with it. There was particular concern over the fact that Amazon had substantial contracts with the federal government, particularly for cloud computing services, including contracts with the intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA.

5:51The Post had just reported on the leaks from Edward Snowden and making disclosures every day that infuriated the intelligence agencies. On the other hand, the Post was doing very, very poorly. And I think people understood that we needed an injection of investment and some new ideas. I certainly thought that.

6:07Murad Ahmed: And you had been at the helm of the post for about a year before Bezos bought the paper, but you and Jeff Bezos actually got on quite well at the beginning, right? Yeah, actually less than a year. It was about seven months before it was announced, much to my surprise. I had just been hired seven months earlier. I did not expect that. Don Graham had actually, who was the patriarch of the family, actually apologized to me for not telling me that they were in negotiations, they were in discussions even when I was hired. And we did get along. You know, he wanted to transform us for the digital era.

6:40He was willing to make an investment over the longer run, or as he called it, give us runway. But he wanted some ideas that really were digital in nature and that would expand our audience beyond the Washington metro area to become truly a national and even international publication. He was supportive and he gave us our independence. And I remain very grateful for that.

6:58Murad Ahmed: And was he particularly hands-on? Did he talk to you about his political views or the political stance of the Post? He did not. He did not talk about his political views at all. He didn't inject himself into our coverage whatsoever. He was really focused on the business side of things, the marketing of the Post, the technology that the Post was using, the pricing, the paywall, developing a new iPad tablet app that we were working on at the time. And he wanted us to be able to deliver our news in a more digitally oriented way. But he did not get involved in the actual content of the coverage. And Anna, in that way, Bezos was initially seen as the kind of the ideal media mogul to take over.

7:39Murad Ahmed: Lots of other struggling news organizations were looking for a Bezos of their own, were they not? I mean, there was kind of a dark joke of like looking for your own billionaire to take over and like a benevolent, wealthy person to come in. And he was sort of viewed as a hero, I think, for a bit. He also came in at a good time in which, you know, the first Trump era was a time when there was just an amazing story to be told. And we saw a lot of papers gain a lot of subscribers because there was just great interest in the news at that time. And there were so many stories to kind of dive into. And it was a time of a kind of a renaissance for the paper.

8:15Murad Ahmed: Yeah, I mean, working at a newsroom halfway across the world, we all looked on quite jealously as all this funding was being poured in and this transformation was happening. But Marty, what were the first signs that the Bezos approach was changing, if there were any? Were there any early warning signs that you spotted? Not while I was there. I left in February of 2021. During that entire time, he stood up for us. I mean, starting back in 2015, and Donald Trump appeared on the scene, on the political scene in the summer of 2015. But Trump was attacking the Post, and because he didn't get anything out of the Post, he started attacking the owner of the Post, who was Jeff Bezos.

8:54And Bezos said quite forcefully that those kinds of comments, that kind of behavior on the part of somebody who aspired to be president of the United States, were entirely inappropriate. That we not only have laws in this country, but we have norms of political behavior. And he suggested that Trump was violating those norms. We're not a new democracy. We're very robust. But it is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode that around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it instead of erode it. And that really continued over the entire time that I was there. Keep in mind that at the end of Trump's term, Trump interfered in this huge$10 billion cloud computing contract for the Defense Department.

9:33And it was expected that it would go to Amazon, given its experience with the intelligence agencies and the fact that it was such a leader in cloud computing. But Trump didn't want to go to Amazon. And ultimately, it was awarded, at least initially before it was rebid to Microsoft. Amazon challenged that. And they actually said very critical things about Trump in their court filings. And they called for Trump himself to be deposed. This is late in the first Trump term. And none of that actually changed until really the transformation, I would say, the evidence of that really came 11 days before the presidential election last year.

10:09Murad Ahmed: And I want to come to that pivotal turning point in just a second. But just tell me quickly, wasn't there some talk in D.C. about what that deal did to the price tag of the post? Well, that was a joke going around the field at the time that it didn't just cost him$250 million. It actually cost him$10 ,250 ,000 ,000 because it did cost him that contract. But at the time, Amazon was quite aggressive in its response. It actually went to court, challenged the bidding process. It did call for Donald Trump himself to be deposed. It said that the way that this contract was awarded was a direct result of Donald Trump's venom toward the Washington Post and therefore toward Jeff Bezos as owner.

10:47That was how Amazon behaved at that time and how Bezos himself, the posture that Bezos himself took at that time.

10:53Murad Ahmed: There was also reporting that Bezos was quite frustrated with the Biden administration. The former president had put Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission. This Amazon skeptic, this big tech skeptic, wanted to break up the companies. The reporting, not least, from Anna has shown that he was very upset with the sense that the Democrats had moved away from him. I've seen all the reporting along those lines, and that makes a lot of sense that he was upset over the appointment of Lena Kahn, as were many other tech executives, and the feeling that the Biden administration had made Amazon a target.

11:28He criticized Biden, which was unusual for him. He went on Twitter to criticize Biden for the inflation rate and for the inflation policies and for the statements that Biden himself had made about inflation, suggesting that it was the result of greed as opposed to sort of underlying economic policies of the Biden administration. So that was unusual behavior on his part because he really, prior to that, he hadn't really voiced political opinions on Twitter. I mean, when he came under attack from Trump during the campaign, he was a novice on Twitter, and I think it was his second tweet. He suggested that perhaps they could send Donald Trump to space in one of his Blue Origin rockets.

12:06But that was the only time I think he came to regret that tweet.

12:09Murad Ahmed: It does feel like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump are more likely to go to space together as friends these days than anything else. But back to that pivotal moment, Jeff Bezos saying that The Washington Post would not endorse a presidential candidate. It had been expected that the Post would endorse Kamala Harris for president. And that rippled through not only the Post newsroom, but across the American media and frankly, the rest of the world as well. Marty, I know that you weren't there at the time, but you are a mentor to many people in that newsroom and you will have heard what was going on at the time.

12:39Murad Ahmed: How did that all go down? Poorly. It went down poorly with me as well. I immediately tweeted out that I was cowardly and spineless on his part. And I think it was the first sign of how business executives really would respond to the prospect of Donald Trump being president. It became increasingly clear as we got close to the election that there was a very good chance that Donald Trump would get elected again to the presidency. And that he would do exactly what he had promised throughout the campaign, which was to seek vengeance on his political enemies. And Jeff Bezos had certainly been perceived as a political enemy for one, really one reason and one reason only.

13:16and that was the coverage of the Washington Post. He actually killed an editorial that had been written by the opinion staff endorsing Kamala Harris and then announced, this was 11 days before the election, that the Post would no longer be publishing presidential endorsements, despite the fact that it had been a tradition at the Post for almost 50 years with only one year of exception. And it made these arguments that it didn't make a difference, that readers didn't really care, etc. etc. Also that it suggested that we weren't independent and we needed to work harder to assert our independence and establish our credibility.

13:51And he made a variety of arguments that I think in the end were ultimately specious. But that was the first sign that he was going to yield to expected pressure from Donald Trump.

14:01Murad Ahmed: Anna, you've reported extensively on this. What was the shock like of that moment and the ripple effect after that? Yeah, I think as Marty said, that was probably the first major sign that something really has changed, that, you know, Bezos is pivoting in how he's approaching this. Then we saw Amazon bought this Melania Trump documentary for$40 million, which seems like a high price to pay for this somewhat random movie. there have been a lot of people leaving the Washington Post newsroom seen that the newsroom's morale is pretty low the paper seems to be kind of struggling commercially Bezos has also overhauled the opinion section and announced that the section would be focusing on personal liberties and free markets we've also seen with Bezos and then also with Patrick Sunchang at the LA Times Before this, there had been, I would say, this kind of cautious optimism around the idea of these billionaires coming in and buying up newspapers.

15:09And now we're really seeing the consequences of what can happen and kind of the dangers of it. So it's, I think, broadly in the industry, there's a rethink around business models for the news in light of what's been happening.

15:23Murad Ahmed: This is what I really want to get into, the big picture stuff. But let's take a short break, And then we'll be back with more on how Trump's impact on the post is symptomatic of a bigger problem for the U.S. media and Trump's relationship with Bezos.

16:05We'll see you next time. forward with confidence. Nice, the proven CXAI leader. Learn more at nice.com.

16:15Murad Ahmed: The new episode of The Next Five is all about the freedom to invent with AI. Steve Tarza at Amazon joins me. I think there's such a huge opportunity for innovation, as does Jim Rowan at Deloitte. We see that when the C-suite is using AI, they get their teams on board as well. and Seth Fox at S &P Global. Our data is our crown jewels. We have to draw a bit of a line around the data, but not around the idea. Listen to The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy.

16:51Murad Ahmed: Marty, you've actually met Jeff Bezos. I wondered if you could just do a little bit of quick psychology with us. Do you think that he's a sort of character that does want to ingratiate himself with power? It seems unclear to me. There seems to be such a big character shift over recent years. I don't know if you have anything that can explain that. I mean, I think it's explainable. Whether I like the explanation or not is another matter. Look, Trump ran a campaign saying he was going to seek retribution on his political enemies. This is a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.

17:26When they impeach you for nothing, then you're supposed to like them. It's not easy, folks. And believe me, if I become president, oh, do they have problems.

17:35Murad Ahmed: They're going to have such problems. You could see at the end of Trump's first term, after he was acquitted, you know, on impeachment charges, that he started going after everybody. He started going after people in the government that he viewed as enemies. He started going after people outside. Bezos has far more substantial commercial interest than The Washington Post. I mean, Amazon is infinitely larger than The Post, and it is the source of his wealth. And Blue Origin, his space company, his private space company, is the source of his passion. He's always been interested in space. And that company had fallen so far behind SpaceX, but it was at an inflection point.

18:08It was about to launch a rocket into orbit and finally being able to compete with SpaceX, which was owned by Elon Musk, who was Trump's best buddy during the transition period. And so Bezos had a lot to fear. I think he was clearly reacting to that. I think he's a very data-driven, hard-boiled kind of person, being kind of a realist, looking at the landscape. And he's not really using the post to advance his commercial interests. I mean, I have to read his mind here, so it's speculative, I acknowledge. But I think he just doesn't want the post to get in the way of his other commercial interests.

18:44Murad Ahmed: And in that sense, is it working? I mean, this is the thing that we have seen with all the tech billionaires that have coded up to Trump since the inauguration. How much is Bezos getting out of this? Well, it seems to be working, at least to some degree. Trump has not been attacking Bezos. I mean, he's attacked the Post on occasions, but it's mild by comparison with what we saw before. And he hasn't gone after Bezos personally. Bezos is getting married in a month or so in Venice, basically locking up all the luxury hotel rooms and all the gondolas, as far as I can tell. And who are among the invitees is Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law.

19:25Donald Trump Jr. is also among those who are invited, as well as his partner. So, you know, he's clearly done a substantial repair job in terms of his relationship with Trump, and Trump has said so to that extent, to the extent that he hasn't become a target of Trump so far, and I emphasize so far, because Trump can change at any at any moment. To that degree, I guess it has worked. But it has not worked for the Washington Post. It has inflicted severe brand damage on the Post. Look, the newsroom is doing really great work. I admire what they're doing. I applaud what they're doing. Every day, they're producing investigative stories, highly revelatory about what the Trump administration is doing.

20:04It's true that there are still economists there who are writing very critically of Trump, and there are editorials that are critical of Trump. So far, Bezos has not become a target of Trump's, but we'll see. I mean, if the newsroom does something that infuriates Trump, really infuriates them at some point, I would imagine that that's quite possible. And that could be one of the effects

20:22Murad Ahmed: that we see, the Washington Post pulling its punches in a way that it hasn't historically. And I guess I want to talk to you both about whether what's happened here could become symptomatic of what's happening across the media in the US right now. There are Trump's threats to individual journalists, the White House control over the press corps, Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS's 60 Minutes resigned, and he cited concerns about independence of editorial decision making, particularly in the light of Donald Trump's lawsuit against the show. I mean, this is a kind of a widespread impact. What do you think is happening, Anna?

21:03Yeah, I mean, I think there's no doubt if you ask CEOs of any major media company or First Amendment lawyers or anyone like that, that he's trying to chill the press. We see it with all these lawsuits he's waged. As you said, with the White House press corps, they have these new influencers in the press corps, which is really just kind of propaganda. If you have like a free 55 minutes and want to watch these influencer press conferences, it's quite surreal. This is our first official influencer briefing here at the White House. What are the administration's plans for those who continue to defy the executive orders?

21:42You have a young, beautiful baby boy. There's so many young folks on staff who have kids. But the last four years under Joe Biden, parents are really stressed and ravaged. You're a very high profile young mother who seems to juggle and balance it all beautifully. What advice do you have to young parents out there?

21:57Murad Ahmed: Great to see you again. Great to see you as well. Great job this morning. And as always, you're really crushing it. If anything, he seems to have stepped it up in terms of how organized it's been. Like the kind of attacks and the insults and the, you know, posting on social media, that was already happening and has been happening for a very long time. But I think in terms of the FCC and the lawsuits and all of that, that seems much more coordinated than it had been before. Marty, do you share some of these concerns about not only the future of the media in the U.S., but a lasting, chilling effect?

22:34I'm very concerned. I mean, I think what we've seen is a real dichotomy. There are a whole bunch of media institutions that continue to do their work. And what I see is among journalists in the field, there's a real determination to live up to and to fulfill their mission, examining our public figures, our politicians, and looking at the kinds of policies that they're implementing, who influence them, the impact. they're having, all of that. At the same time, and this gets at the dichotomy, is I think on the ownership level, we're seeing something very different. There are parent companies like Disney and like Paramount who have other commercial interests that they are worried about.

23:07In the case of Paramount, which owns CBS, it wants to execute a merger with a company called Skydance, and it can't get that merger executed without the approval of the Federal Communications Commission. With regard to ABC, which already reached a settlement of$15 million plus a million dollars in attorney's fees with Trump, which is money in his pocket, by the way, that is owned by Disney. And Disney has an enormous number of other interests and does not want to find itself in conflict with the president of the United States. What we're seeing is a lot of yielding to pressure or threats or worries about being in conflict with this particular president on the part of the owners while journalists in the field are continuing to do their work.

23:45And look, what we need in this profession is we need the owners and the journalists in the field to share a commitment to a free and independent press. And when we don't have that kind of alignment, there's a lot of cause for worry. And for that reason, I'm worried.

23:58Murad Ahmed: So owners and journalists need to be on the same page. But isn't this all a headache for Bezos? Beyond the political liability, the Washington Post is not exactly in great shape financially. It lost$100 million last year. It's in the middle of layoffs. Why doesn't Bezos just get rid of it? Why doesn't he just sell the Post? I mean, I think he bought the Post for a variety of reasons. I actually think he did believe in the role of the press. He did believe that it's an important institution. He is kind of idealistic about American democracy, or I would say he was. The scales may have fallen off his eyes in that respect.

24:34And I think that he saw an opportunity to turn it around. I mean, here was a brand that was in the nation's capital, had a name, the Washington Post, that could be leveraged across the world, then he could grab it for$250 million and try to build it into something bigger. And we did. We had six straight years of profitability when I was there. Now they're encountering a lot of problems for, I think, a variety of reasons, some big strategic mistakes that they made over the years. And I think he wants to try to turn it around again and show that he can do that. On top of that, who wants to buy a major media institution that's losing$80 to$100 million a year, for God's sakes?

25:10I mean, that is not the most attractive proposition for wealthy people, except for people who

25:17Murad Ahmed: You could have a consortium. You could be at the head of it. Yeah, great. Thanks for the idea. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think I could round up enough people to buy it. And, you know, the only people who would really be in the market for that are wealthy allies of Donald Trump. And I don't think that Bezos wants to do that. I don't think that he wants that to be his legacy, that he sold the Washington Post to ideologically driven people. Look, for all his efforts to repair his relationship with Trump and cozy up to him and all of that, I am convinced that he doesn't think Donald Trump should have been president in the first place.

25:50It's not his preference. It's what he's having to deal with. I don't like the way that he's dealing with it at the moment, but I honestly don't believe that he wants to sell it to somebody who's idyllicably driven.

26:01Murad Ahmed: Marty, Anna, thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Murat. In the next episode of Tectonic, another titan of US tech who's gone on a very public and very personal political journey, Mark Zuckerberg. Seeing Donald Trump get shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life. If you thought Jeff Bezos had it bad, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with life in prison if he interfered in the election. So why is the Meta CEO now embracing Trump's free speech agenda? Is it all about his businesses, or has Zuckerberg been MAGA all along?

26:46Murad Ahmed: You've been listening to Tectonic with me, Murad Ahmed. This episode was produced by Josh Gabbard-Doyon. The senior producer is Edwin Lane, and the executive producer is Flo Phillips. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giavinka. Original music by Metaphor Music. Manuela Zaragoza and Topher Forges are the FT's acting heads of audio.

27:33It looked like a race to write the rulebook and not just a race to build the most powerful technology.

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