Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he is “optimistic” about President-elect Donald Trump's second term and expressed some excitement about the possibility of regulatory cuts in the coming years.
“I'm actually very optimistic about this,” Bezos said onstage during a wide-ranging interview at the New York Times' Dealbook Summit in New York. “He seems to have a lot of energy for deregulation. If I can help with that, I'm going to help him.”
“There are too many regulations in this country,” Bezos added.
The comments followed Bezos's decision in October to ban the Washington Post from endorsing presidential candidates, a move that led to tens of thousands of people canceling their subscriptions and the paper's There was a protest from journalists with extensive backgrounds.
At the time, Bezos said in an op-ed for the newspaper that the editor's endorsement creates a perception of bias at a time when many Americans don't trust the media and are doing nothing to change the scale of the election.
On Wednesday, he said he would try to “dissuade” President Trump from thinking that: the media is the enemy.
“You've probably grown up over the last eight years,” he told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Neither does he. This is not true. The media is not the enemy.”
During Trump's first term, he blasted Bezos and his companies, including Amazon and the Washington Post. In 2019, Amazon argued in court that President Trump's bias against the company hurt its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract. The Biden administration has since pursued deals with both Amazon and Microsoft.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bezos said he did not expect Elon Musk, who is tasked with deregulation in Trump's next term, to use his power to harm business competitors. spoke. Bezos owns Blue Origin, a rival to Musk's SpaceX.
