This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Trump’s Tech Bros — Has Jeff Bezos sold out?’
Anna Nicolaou
This yacht costs $500mn, it can sleep 45 people, it has a support yacht. There’s this big mermaid figure on the bow, and it’s also kind of old school because it’s a sailboat, so it looks kind of like a figure from the past.
Murad Ahmed
That’s Anna Nicolaou, the FT’s US media editor, talking about Jeff Bezos’s sailing superyacht. Bezos, founder of Amazon and rocket maker Blue Origin, had just been crowned richest man in the world, and what does anyone do when they become the wealthiest person on the planet? They buy a yacht.
Anna Nicolaou
It’s become kind of the symbol of his newfound lavish persona in recent years.
Murad Ahmed
The other status symbol to complement his newfound lavish persona: buy a newspaper. And not just any paper. How about The Washington Post?
Anna Nicolaou
Bezos bought The Post at a time when The Post was really kind of struggling. So people, I think, were initially pretty excited about it because obviously, you know, Bezos has capacity to invest. People were feeling pretty good and optimistic.
Marty Baron
Well, I think he spent more on the yacht than he spent on The Post, by the way.
Murad Ahmed
So says Marty Baron, the legendary former editor of The Washington Post, who was helming the paper when Bezos bought it.
Marty Baron
The Post was $250mn and as I recall his yacht was about $500mn.
Murad Ahmed
In buying The Post, Bezos was buying an American institution, the newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers and helped to bring down President Nixon. It was a paper of record, respected by politicians and policymakers, and it wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power. Shortly after buying The Post, Bezos helped give the paper a catchy new tagline: “Democracy dies in darkness”.
Marty Baron
I actually think he did believe in the role of the press. He did believe that it’s an important institution. He is kind of idealistic about American democracy, or I would say he was.
Murad Ahmed
Today, that idealism seems to be in question. Once a sworn enemy, Bezos has become an ally to Donald Trump. So, in this episode: why did Jeff Bezos change his mind about Trump? And what does that mean for The Washington Post and the future of American media?
(MUSIC PLAYING)
This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Murad Ahmed, the FT’s technology news editor. And in this season of the podcast, I’m exploring the relationships between Donald Trump and some of the titans of the tech world. What’s really driving those relationships? How they are playing out? And what might they mean for the future of the technology industry in the US and around the world? In this episode, me and Anna Nicolaou speak to Marty Baron for his unique perspective on Jeff Bezos, what he saw of the Bezos-Trump relationship, and to understand how Trump is reshaping the American media landscape.
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I started by asking Anna about Bezos and Trump’s relationship during the President’s first term.
Anna Nicolaou
It was quite contentious. Bezos fought with Trump a lot. Trump was really quite aggressive towards Bezos because he was the owner of The Washington Post, and for Trump, that made him an enemy. It really seemed to be that simple.
News clip
President Trump going after Amazon again, this time in a series of tweets. He writes so many stories about me and The Washington Post are fake news.
Donald Trump voice clip
This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, tax-wise. He’s using The Washington Post for power.
News clip
Donald Trump can’t stand Jeff Bezos. He’s complained about him to everybody, including me.
Anna Nicolaou
As we know at this point, Trump is all about retribution on his enemies. So he would be calling Bezos names. He would interfere on commercial things. Kind of everyone we’ve spoken to said that that had a huge impact on Bezos, really got into his head. So there was a lot of back and forth during that first term.
Murad Ahmed
Right, Trump’s nickname for him was Jeff Bozo, for example, and that language seems to have gone away in the second term.
Anna Nicolaou
Yeah, I think it’s probably worth noting that this wasn’t the case just for Bezos. It seems really foreign now almost, but at the time for a lot of the big CEOs in America and Trump himself has made a lot comments like this saying, you know, people didn’t used to like me and now they all love me. It was really actually pretty standard during his first term. We saw a lot the bigger people in corporate America would, you know, they didn’t really speak in favour of Trump at all. And now we see them all kind of getting in line.
Murad Ahmed
Marty, to come to you, let’s go back more than a decade now when Bezos bought The Post just before Trump’s first term back in 2013 from his friend Don Graham, and the Grahams were an institution in DC and across the American media. Why do you think Bezos wanted to buy it in the first place?
Marty Baron
Well, it was a huge surprise, of course. The Graham family had owned The Post for 80 years. Nobody expected that they would sell The Post. There was concern, of course, nobody had any idea why Jeff Bezos was acquiring The Post, what he intended to do with it. There was particular concern over the fact that Amazon had substantial contracts with the federal government, particularly for cloud computing services, including contracts with the intelligence agencies and particularly the CIA. The Post had just reported on the leaks from Edward Snowden. And making disclosures everyday that infuriated the intelligence agencies. On the other hand, The Post was doing very, very poorly. And I think people understood that we needed an injection of investment and some new ideas. I certainly thought that.
Murad Ahmed
And you had been at the helm of The Post for about a year before Bezos bought the paper, but you and Jeff Bezos actually got on quite well at the beginning, right?
Marty Baron
Yeah, actually less than a year. It was about seven months before it was announced. Much to my surprise, I had just been hired seven months earlier. I did not expect that. Don Graham had actually, was the patriarch of the family, actually apologised to me for not telling me that they were in negotiations, they were into discussions even when I was hired. And we did get along. You know, he wanted to transform us for the digital era. He was willing to make an investment over the longer run, or as he called it, give us runway. But he wanted some ideas that really were digital in nature and that would expand our audience beyond the Washington metro area to become truly a national and even international publication. He was supportive and he gave us our independence. And I remain very grateful for that.
Murad Ahmed
And was he particularly hands-on? Did he talk to you about his political views or the political stance of The Post?
Marty Baron
He did not, he did not talk about his political views at all. He didn’t inject himself into our coverage whatsoever. He was really focused on the business side of things, the marketing of The Post, the technology that The Post was using, the pricing, the paywall, developing a new iPad tablet app that we were working on at the time. And he wanted us to be able to deliver our news in a more digitally oriented way, but he did get involved in the actual content of the coverage.
Murad Ahmed
And Anna, in that way, Bezos was initially seen as the kind of the ideal media mogul to take over. Lots of other struggling news organisations were looking for a Bezos of their own, were they not?
Anna Nicolaou
I mean, there was kind of a dark joke of like, looking for your own billionaire to take over and like a benevolent, wealthy person to come in. And he was sort of viewed as a hero, I think, for a bit. He also came in at a good time in which, you know, the first Trump era was a time when there was just an amazing story to be told. And we saw a lot of papers gain a lot of subscribers because there was this great interest in the news at that time. And there were so many stories to kind of dive into and it was a time of a kind of a renaissance for the paper.
Murad Ahmed
Yeah. I mean, working at a newsroom halfway across the world, we all looked on quite jealously as all this funding was being poured in and this transformation was happening. But Marty, what were the first signs that the Bezos approach was changing, if there were any? Were there any early warning signs that you spotted?
Marty Baron
Not while I was there, I left in February of 2021. During that entire time, he stood up for us. I mean, starting back in 2015 and Donald Trump appeared on the scene, on the political scene in the summer of 2015, but Trump was attacking The Post and because he didn’t get anything out of The Post, he started attacking the owner of The Post who was Jeff Bezos and Bezos said quite forcefully that those kinds of comments, that kind of behaviour on the part of somebody who aspired to be president of the United States were entirely inappropriate. That we not only have laws in this country, but we have norms of political behaviour. And he suggested that Trump was violating those norms.
Jeff Bezos voice clip
We are not a new democracy. We’re very robust, but it is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode that around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it instead of erode it.
Marty Baron
And that really continued over the entire time that I was there. Keep in mind that at the end of Trump’s term, Trump interfered in this huge $10bn cloud computing contract for the defence department. And it was expected that it would go to Amazon, given its experience with the intelligence agencies and the fact that it was such a leader in cloud computing, but Trump didn’t want it to go to Amazon and ultimately it was awarded, at least initially before it was rebid, to Microsoft. Amazon challenged that and they actually said very critical things about Trump in their court filings, and they called for Trump himself to be deposed. This is late in the first Trump term, and none of that actually changed until really the transformation, I would say, the evidence of that really came 11 days before the presidential election last year.
Murad Ahmed
And I want to come to that pivotal turning point in just a second, but just tell me quickly, wasn’t there some talk in DC about what that deal did to the price tag of The Post?
Marty Baron
Well, that was a joke going around the field at the time, that it didn’t just cost him $250mn, it actually cost him $10bn and $250mn. Because it did cost him that contract. But at the time, Amazon was quite aggressive in its response. It actually went to court, challenged the bidding process. It did call for Donald Trump himself to be deposed. It said that the way that this contract was awarded was a direct result of Donald Trump’s venom towards The Washington Post and therefore towards Jeff Bezos as owner. That was how Amazon behaved at the time and how Bezos himself, the posture that Bezos himself took at that time.
Murad Ahmed
There was also reporting that Bezos was quite frustrated with the Biden administration. The former president had put Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission. This Amazon sceptic, this Big Tech sceptic wanted to break up the companies. The reporting, not least from Anna, has shown that he was very upset with the sense that the Democrats had moved away from him.
Marty Baron
I’ve seen all the reporting along those lines, and that makes a lot of sense that he was upset over the appointment of Lina Khan, as were many other tech executives, and the feeling that the Biden administration had made Amazon a target. He criticised Biden, which was unusual for him. He went on Twitter to criticise Biden for the inflation rate and for the inflation policies and for the statements that Biden himself had made about inflation, suggesting that it was the result of greed as opposed to sort of underlying economic policies of the Biden administration. So that was an unusual behaviour on his part because he really, prior to that, he hadn’t really voiced political opinions on Twitter. I mean, when he came under attack from Trump during the campaign, he was a novice on Twitter and I think it was his second tweet. He suggested that perhaps they could send Donald Trump to space in one of his Blue Origin rockets. But that was the only time I think he came to regret that tweet.
Murad Ahmed
It does feel like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump are more likely to go to space together as friends these days than anything else. But back to that pivotal moment, Jeff Bezos saying that The Washington Post would not endorse a presidential candidate, it had been expected that The Post would endorse Kamala Harris for President. And that kind of rippled through not only The Post newsroom, but across the American media and frankly, the rest of the world as well. Marty, I know that you weren’t there at the time, but you are a mentor to many people in that newsroom and you will have heard what was going on at the time. How did that all go down?
Marty Baron
Poorly. It went down poorly with me as well. I immediately tweeted out that that was cowardly and spineless on his part, and I think it was the first sign of how business executives really would respond to the prospect of Donald Trump being president. It became increasingly clear as we got close to the election that there was a very good chance that Donald Trump would get elected again to the presidency and that he would do exactly what he had promised throughout the campaign, which was to seek vengeance on his political enemies.
And Jeff Bezos had certainly been perceived as a political enemy for one really one reason and one reason only and that was the coverage of The Washington Post. He actually killed an editorial that had been written by the opinion staff endorsing Kamala Harris and then announced, this was 11 days before the election, that The Post would no longer be publishing presidential endorsements despite the fact that it had been a tradition at The Post for almost 50 years with only one year of exception. And it made his arguments that it didn’t make a difference, that readers didn’t really care, etc. Also that it suggested that we weren’t independent and we needed to work harder to assert our independence and establish our credibility. And he made a variety of arguments that I think in the end were ultimately specious. But that was the first sign that he was going to yield to expected pressure from Donald Trump.
Murad Ahmed
Anna, you’ve reported extensively on this. What was the shock like of that moment and the ripple effect after that?
Anna Nicolaou
Yeah, I think as Marty said, that was probably the first major sign that something really has changed, that Bezos is pivoting in how he’s approaching this. Then we saw Amazon bought this Melania Trump documentary for $40mn, which seemed like a high price to pay for this somewhat random movie. There have been a lot of people leaving The Washington Post newsroom. Seemed that the newsroom’s morale is pretty low. The paper seems to be kind of struggling commercially. Bezos has also overhauled the opinion section and announced that the section would be focusing on personal liberties and free markets. (Inaudible) with Bezos and then also with Patrick Soon-Shiong at the LA Times. Before this, there had been, I would say, this kind of cautious optimism around the idea of these billionaires coming in and buying up newspapers. And now we’re really seeing the consequences of what can happen and kind of the dangers of it. So it’s, I think broadly in the industry, there’s a rethink around business models for the news in light of what’s been happening.
Murad Ahmed
This is what I really want to get into, the big picture stuff. But let’s take a short break and then we’ll be back with more on how Trump’s impact on The Post is symptomatic of a bigger problem for the US media and Trump’s relationship with Bezos.
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Marty, you’ve actually met Jeff Bezos. I wondered if you could just do a little bit of quick psychology with us. Do you think that he’s a sort of character that does want to ingratiate himself with power? It seems unclear to me. There seems to be such a big character shift over recent years. I don’t know if you have anything that can explain that.
Marty Baron
I mean, I think it’s explainable. Whether I like the explanation or not is another matter. Look, Trump ran a campaign saying he was going to seek retribution on his political enemies.
Donald Trump voice clip
This is a continuation of the single greatest witch-hunt of all time.
When they impeach you for nothing, then you’re supposed to like them. It’s not easy, folks.
And believe me, if I become president, oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.
Marty Baron
You could see at the end of Trump’s first term, after he was acquitted on impeachment charges, that he started going after everybody. He started going people in the government that he viewed as enemies. He started going after people outside. Bezos has far more substantial commercial interest than The Washington Post. I mean, Amazon is infinitely larger than the Post, and it is the source of his wealth. And Blue Origin, his space company, his private space company is the source of this passion. He’s always been interested in space. And that company had fallen so far behind SpaceX, but it was at an inflection point. It was about to launch a rocket into orbit and finally being able to compete with SpaceX, which was owned by Elon Musk, who was Trump’s best buddy during the transition period. And so Bezos had a lot to fear. Well, I think he was clearly reacting to that. I think he’s a very data-driven, hard-boiled kind of person, being a kind of a realist looking at the landscape. And he’s not really using The Post to advance his commercial interests. I mean, I have to read his mind here, so it’s speculative, I acknowledge, but I think he just doesn’t want The Post to get in the way of his other commercial interests.
Murad Ahmed
And in that sense, is it working? I mean, this is the thing that we have seen with all the tech billionaires that have cozied up to Trump since the inauguration. How much is Bezos getting out of this?
Marty Baron
Well, it seems to be working at least to some degree. Trump has not been attacking Bezos. I mean, he’s attacked The Post on occasions, but it’s mild by comparison with what we saw before, and he hasn’t gone after Bezos personally. Bezos is getting married in a month or so in Venice, basically locking up all the luxury hotel rooms and all the gondolas, as far as I can tell. And who are among the invitees is Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Donald Trump Jr is also among those who are invited, as well as his partner. So you know, he’s clearly done a substantial repair job in terms of his relationship with Trump, and Trump has said so.
To that extent, to the extent that he hasn’t become a target of Trump so far, and I emphasise so far because Trump can change at any moment. To that degree, I guess it has worked. But it has not worked for The Washington Post. It has inflicted severe brand damage on The Post. Look, the newsroom is doing really great work. I admire what they’re doing. I applaud what they are doing. Every day they’re producing investigative stories, highly revelatory about what the Trump administration is doing. It’s true that there’s still economists there who are writing very critically of Trump and there are editorials that are critical of Trump. So far, Bezos has not become a target of Trump’s, but we’ll see. I mean, if the newsroom does something that infuriates Trump, really infuriates him at some point, I would imagine that that’s quite possible.
Murad Ahmed
And that could be one of the effects that we see. The Washington Post pulling its punches in a way that it hasn’t historically. And I guess I want to talk to you both about whether what’s happened here could become symptomatic of what’s happening across the media in the US right now. There are Trump’s threats to individual journalists, the White House control over the press corps. Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, resigned and he cited concerns about independence of editorial decision-making, particularly in the light of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the show. I mean, this is a kind of a widespread impact. What do you think is happening, Anna?
Anna Nicolaou
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s no doubt if you ask CEOs of any major media company or First Amendment lawyers or anyone of like that, that he’s trying to chill the press. We see it with all these lawsuits he’s waged. As you said, with the White House press corps, they have these new influencers in the press corps, which is really just kind of propaganda. If you have like a free 55 minutes and want to watch these influencer press conferences, it’s quite surreal.
Audio clip 1
This is our first official influencer briefing here at the White House.
Audio clip 2
What are the administration’s plans for those who continue to defy the executive orders?
Audio clip 3
You have a young, beautiful baby boy. There’s so many young folks on staff who have kids. But the last four years under Joe Biden, parents were really stressed and ravaged. You’re a very high-profile young mother who seems to juggle and balance it all beautifully. What advice do you have to young parents out there?
Audio clip 4
Great to see you again.
Audio clip 5
Great to see you as well. Great job this morning. As always, you’re really crushing it.
Anna Nicolaou
If anything, I think he seems to have stepped it up in terms of how organised it’s been, like the kind of attacks and the insults and the, you know, posting on social media, that was already happening and has been happening for a very long time. But I think in terms of the FCC and the lawsuits and all of that, that seems much more co-ordinated than it had been before.
Murad Ahmed
Marty, do you share some of these concerns about not only the future of the media in the US, but a lasting chilling effect?
Marty Baron
I’m very concerned. I mean, I think what we’ve seen is a real dichotomy. There are a whole bunch of media institutions that continue to do their work. And what I see is among journalists in the field is a real determination to live up to and to fulfil their mission, examining our public figures, our politicians and looking at the kinds of policies that they’re implementing, who influenced them, the impact they’re having, all of that.
At the same time, and this gets at the dichotomy, is I think on the ownership level, we’re seeing something very different. There are parent companies like Disney and like Paramount who have other commercial interests that they are worried about. In the case of Paramount, which owns CBS, it wants to execute a merger with a company called Skydance. And it can’t get that merger executed without the approval of the Federal Communications Commission. With regard to ABC, which already reached a settlement of $15mn plus $1mn in attorney’s fees with Trump, which is money in his pocket, by the way, that is owned by Disney. And Disney has an enormous number of other interests and does not want to find itself in conflict with the president of the United States.
What we’re seeing is a lot of yielding to pressure or threats or worries about being in conflict with this particular president on the part of the owners, while journalists in the field are continuing to do their work. And look, what we need in this profession is we need the owners and the journalists in the fields to share a commitment to a free and independent press. And when we don’t have that kind of alignment, there’s a lot cause for worry. And for that reason, I’m worried.
Murad Ahmed
So owners and journalists need to be on the same page. But isn’t this all a headache for Bezos? Beyond the political liability, The Washington Post is not exactly in a great shape financially. It lost $100mn last year. It’s in the middle of lay-offs. Why doesn’t Bezos just get rid of it?
Marty Baron
Why doesn’t he just sell The Post? I mean, I think he bought The Post for a variety of reasons. I actually think he did believe in the role of the press. He did believe that it’s an important institution. He is kind of idealistic about American democracy, or I would say he was. The scales may have fallen off his eyes in that respect. And I think that he saw an opportunity to turn it around. I mean here was a brand that was in the nation’s capital, had a name, The Washington Post, that could be leveraged across the world and he could grab it for $250mn and try to build it into something bigger. And we did, we had six straight years of profitability when I was there. Now they’re encountering a lot of problems for I think a variety of reasons, some big strategic mistakes that they made over the years. And I think he wants to try to turn it around again and show that he can do that. On top of that, who wants to buy a major media institution that’s losing $80mn-$100mn a year for God’s sakes? I mean, that is not the most attractive proposition for wealthy people, except for people . . .
Murad Ahmed
You could have a consortium, you could be at the head of it.
Marty Baron
Yeah, great. Thanks for the idea. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think I could round up enough people to buy it. And you know, the only people who would really be in the market for that are wealthy allies of Donald Trump. And I don’t think that Bezos wants to do that. I don´t think he wants that to be his legacy, that he sold The Washington Post to ideologically driven people. Look, for all his efforts to repair his relationship with Trump and cosy up to him and all of that, I am convinced that he doesn’t think Donald Trump should have been president in the first place. It’s not his preference. It is what he is having to deal with. I don’t like the way that he is dealing with it at the moment, but I honestly don’t believe that he wants to sell it to somebody who is ideologically driven.
Murad Ahmed
Marty, Anna, thank you both so much.
Marty Baron
Thank you.
Anna Nicolaou
Thank you so much, Murad.
Murad Ahmed
In the next episode of Tech Tonic, another titan of US tech who’s gone on a very public and very personal political journey: Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg voice clip
Seeing Donald Trump get shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.
Murad Ahmed
If you thought Jeff Bezos had it bad, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with life in prison if he interfered in the election. So why is the Meta CEO now embracing Trump’s free speech agenda? Is it all about his businesses, or has Zuckerberg been Maga all along?
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You’ve been listening to Tech Tonic with me, Murad Ahmed. This episode was produced by Josh Gabert-Doyon. The senior producer is Edwin Lane, and the executive producer is Flo Phillips. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. Manuela Saragosa and Topher Forhecz are the FT’s acting heads of audio.
