What game is Jeff Bezos playing?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The world’s third-richest man does not often show deference. But Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and space pioneer, is a businessman, like any other, trying to make his way in the era of Donald Trump.
Bezos joined the caravan of billionaires and tech titans who trekked to Mar-a-Lago to pay their respects in the days after Trump’s election victory. His turn came on an evening in mid-December, when Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, dined with Trump and Melania. At some point in the evening, Elon Musk joined the party.
It was a strange tableau: Bezos wedged between the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man. Trump had smeared him and sought to brutalize his businesses during his first term in the White House; Musk is his business rival and sneering antagonist in the contest of billionaire space explorers. For Bezos, that dinner was but one of a series of recent Trump-friendly gestures that have turned heads and prompted onlookers to wonder just what game he is playing as he positions himself for the second chapter of MAGA rule.
Is Bezos putting on a patient and calculating defense, like a student of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War," or has he undergone a Trump-era political transformation? Does he have fixed politics or principles, or is he governed more by shifting levels of testosterone and ruthlessness? These questions apply not only to Bezos but to a coterie of fellow tech lords who appear to have blown with the Trumpian wind, most notably, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. He delighted Trump with his recent decision to end moderation on Facebook while jettisoning DEI policies at his company. Outwardly, the chain-wearing Zuck appears to have undergone a MAGA bro makeover.
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