Amazon founder Jeff Bezos mentioned Wednesday that he’s “optimistic” about President-elect Donald Trump’s second time period and expressed some pleasure about potential regulatory cutbacks within the coming years.
“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos mentioned on stage throughout a wide-ranging interview at The New York Instances’ DealBook Summit in New York. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help do that, I’m going to help him.”
“We do have too many regulations in this country,” Bezos added.
The feedback comply with an October choice by Bezos to ban The Washington Put up, which he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate, a transfer that led to tens of hundreds of individuals canceling their subscriptions and protests from journalists with a deep historical past on the newspaper.
On the time, Bezos wrote in an op-ed within the newspaper saying editorial endorsements create a notion of bias at a time when many People don’t consider the media, and do nothing to tip the scales of an election.
On Wednesday, he mentioned he would attempt to speak Trump “out of the idea” that the press is the enemy.
“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he mentioned to journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too. This is not the case. The press is not the enemy.”
Trump had railed towards Bezos and his firms, together with Amazon and The Washington Put up, throughout his first time period. In 2019, Amazon argued in a courtroom case that Trump’s bias towards the corporate harmed its probabilities of successful a $10 billion Pentagon contract. The Biden administration later pursued a contract with each Amazon and Microsoft.
In one other a part of the interview, Bezos mentioned he doesn’t count on Elon Musk, who has been tasked with chopping laws within the upcoming Trump time period, to make use of his energy to harm his enterprise opponents. Bezos owns Blue Origin, a rival to Musk’s SpaceX.
