The move by Jeff Bezos, the bazillionaire owner of the Washington Post, to squelch the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president makes total sense, if you’re Jeff Bezos.
Oh, sure, his paper is hemorrhaging subscribers, but let’s face it, the Post has been losing money hand over fist for years anyway.
The New York Times has long since won the national newspaper battle, because the people who run the Times made smart business moves years ago, and continue to expand on those.
The Post isn’t even a loss leader anymore for Bezos, the founder of Amazon, which has people at your house dropping off packages seven days a week, and a space company called Blue Origin, which is way behind in the billionaire space race vis-à-vis Elon Musk.
If you’re a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the way you made billions, and will continue to make billions, is to continue to fleece the federal government for big contracts.
To that end, executives with Blue Origin met with Donald Trump on Friday, after Bezos blocked the Post endorsement of Harris.
Musk has already thrown his hat into the ring for Trump, as you already know.
Here’s the calculus there: at least on paper, this is a 50/50 race, and if Trump wins, we know he will direct the federal government to play favorites, and if you want to be one of those favorites, you’ve got to get in line.
Flip side of that, Democrats haven’t played that zero-sum game.
You wouldn’t expect Kamala Harris to block Amazon from getting multibillion-dollar federal government contracts, to pull funding from the silly billionaires competing in their juvenile space cowboy race.
Meanwhile, you have Trump threatening to take down everybody from Google to the mom-and-pop shoe cobbler on the other side of town.
Basically, Bezos, billionaire owner of a fading news industry giant, faces nothing in the way of repercussions for putting his thumb on the scales for the would-be autocrat.
Maybe that needs to change.
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Chris Graham
