Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Wednesday that he is “optimistic” about President-elect Donald Trump’s second term and expressed some excitement about potential regulatory cutbacks in the coming years.
“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said on stage during a wide-ranging interview at The New York Times’ 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 comments follow an October decision by Bezos to prohibit The Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate, a move that led to tens of thousands of people canceling their subscriptions and protests from journalists with a deep history at the newspaper.
At the time, Bezos wrote in an op-ed in the newspaper saying editorial endorsements create a perception of bias at a time when many Americans don’t believe the media, and do nothing to tip the scales of an election.
On Wednesday, he said he would try to talk Trump “out of the idea” that the press is the enemy.
“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too. This is not the case. The press is not the enemy.”
Trump had railed against Bezos and his companies, including Amazon and The Washington Post, during his first term. In 2019, Amazon argued in a court case that Trump’s bias against the company harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract. The Biden administration later pursued a contract with both Amazon and Microsoft.
In another part of the interview, Bezos said he doesn’t expect Elon Musk, who has been tasked with cutting regulations in the upcoming Trump term, to use his power to hurt his business competitors. Bezos owns Blue Origin, a rival to Musk’s SpaceX.