Jeff Bezos
Net Worth: $377 Billion (9/21/26, Forbes)
Who is Jeff Bezos?
- Bezos is the founder and executive chairman of the e-commerce giant Amazon. Bezos served as Amazon’s CEO until he stepped down in 2021, but he remains heavily involved in the company’s artificial intelligence business. Bezos also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin and co-founded and serves as co-CEO of the AI startup Prometheus.
- In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million, and mostly stayed away from the newsroom as the paper covered the controversies in the first Trump administration. However, during the 2024 presidential campaign, Bezos became more involved in the Post’s editorial decisions as he started to improve his relationship with Trump. Bezos infamously vetoed the Post’s endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
- In February 2025, Bezos ordered the Post’s opinions section to exclusively publish views that aligned with his free market and libertarian ideology and no longer publish opposing viewpoints on those topics. David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, stepped down in response.
- In February 2025, Bezos ordered the Post’s opinions section to exclusively publish views that aligned with his free market and libertarian ideology and no longer publish opposing viewpoints on those topics. David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, stepped down in response.
- After the 2024 election, Bezos continued to build his relationship with Trump.
- In December 2024, Bezos attended a dinner with then president-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Fellow billionaire Elon Musk also attended.
- Bezos attended Trump’s second inauguration after Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
- Amazon donated an undisclosed amount to Trump’s $600 million White House ballroom project.
- During a May 2026 interview with CNBC, Bezos said that he “believes President Donald Trump is a ‘more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.’”
- Amazon paid $40 million for the distribution rights to First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary Melania, nearly tripling the bid submitted by Disney. Amazon spent another $35 million on marketing. The film was widely panned by critics, with some critics calling it propaganda. Melania Trump reportedly earned $10.7 million from the documentary; the movie only grossed $16.6 million during its theatrical run.
- In March 2025, Amazon Prime began to stream episodes of The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s reality TV show that originally aired more than 20 years ago.
- In March 2025, Amazon Prime began to stream episodes of The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s reality TV show that originally aired more than 20 years ago.
- Amazon created an official storefront for the Trump Organization, which sells Trump-branded merchandise to Amazon shoppers.
- Amazon has been involved in several lawsuits brought by the Federal Trade Commission.
- In September 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power. The complaint alleged that Amazon stifles competition on “price, production selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers […].” Amazon won a partial dismissal of the case in 2024, but the trial is set to begin in 2027.
- In August 2026, the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging that the “company engaged in deceptive and unfair practices that secretly inflated prices in its online search advertising auctions” and extracted tens of billions of dollars from its advertising customers.
How is Bezos benefitting from the Trump administration?
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Bezos’ Blue Origin contracts with the federal government have accelerated in Trump’s second term. Since 2025, Blue Origin has been awarded over $1.1 billion in federal contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense.
- In August 2026, NASA awarded Blue Origin a $660 million contract to design and launch space vehicles for Mars missions and human exploration.
- In April 2025, the U.S. Space Force, the space-focused military branch established during Trump’s first term, approved Blue Origin “to launch seven military and intelligence-related missions valued at up to $2.4 billion.”
- Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business, has been awarded over $888 million in federal contracts since 2025; over $650 million in contracts comes from the Defense Department.
- AWS also provides cloud services for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. In September 2025, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) paid AWS $25 million for cloud services and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) also does business with AWS. In total, the Department of Homeland Security had paid AWS over $100 million for its services during Trump’s second term.
- Palantir, the AI-company providing technology to ICE, holds business partnerships with AWS. During the first Trump administration, Palantir paid AWS $600,000 a month for its cloud computing services. Palantri needed to host its immigration data management and surveillance system on a federally authorized cloud service as a condition for securing federal contracts. AWS, which already held the necessary authorizations, was chosen.
- Palantir, the AI-company providing technology to ICE, holds business partnerships with AWS. During the first Trump administration, Palantir paid AWS $600,000 a month for its cloud computing services. Palantri needed to host its immigration data management and surveillance system on a federally authorized cloud service as a condition for securing federal contracts. AWS, which already held the necessary authorizations, was chosen.
- AWS also provides cloud services for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. In September 2025, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) paid AWS $25 million for cloud services and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) also does business with AWS. In total, the Department of Homeland Security had paid AWS over $100 million for its services during Trump’s second term.
- Trump’s assault on the federal government’s corporate enforcement capacity has ensured that Amazon and Bezos have been able to dodge accountability or walk away with absurdly inadequate penalties for their labor and antitrust violations.
- In August 2025, Amazon agreed to pay a $2.25 million civil penalty for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The FTC alleged that Amazon failed “to provide identity theft victims with requested records of transactions involving people believed to have fraudulently used those victims’ identification, and by failing to provide those records within 30 days of a request.”
- In September 2025, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC allegations that Amazon used deceptive sign-up and cancellation practices to rope tens of millions of customers into paying for its Prime memberships.
- Crystal Carey, Trump’s general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), intervened into at least two labor disputes on behalf of Amazon. In both disputes, Carey interceded with a “unilateral settlement agreement,” a binding legal contract in which the counsel reaches an agreement with one party (Amazon), even over the objections of the other (the workers).
- Amazon has a history of mistreating its employees and engaging in anti-labor practices.
- Employees at Amazon’s warehouses and fulfillment centers have accused the company of hazardous working conditions, grueling shifts, and missing wages. Amazon was shown to be aware that the demands on delivery drivers are so severe that drivers resorted to urinating and defecating in bottles while en route in order to meet quotas.
- In 2024, a Senate investigation found that Amazon warehouse employees were twice as likely to be injured compared to workers at non-Amazon warehouses.
- In December 2022, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued Amazon 14 citations for violating the Occupational Safety and Health Act. In February 2023, OSHA issued three more citations for exposing workers to unsafe conditions.
- Amazon has engaged in union busting, and violated labor law multiple times.
- In June 2023, a National Labor Review Board judge ordered Amazon to bargain with union representatives after it was found that the company failed to recognize the union.
- In November 2023, Administrative Law Judge Lauren Esposito found that Amazon violated the National Labor Relations Act when it retaliated against employees who supported unionization efforts.
- Amazon has a history of mistreating its employees and engaging in anti-labor practices.
- Like his fellow oligarchs, Bezos benefitted greatly from Trump’s 2025 tax legislation, aka the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which gave massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.
- Amazon said it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill in 2025 against $90 billion in profits. For comparison, in 2024, Amazon paid $9 billion in taxes.
- In 2025, Amazon paid an effective tax rate of 1.4%, saving over $17 billion it should have paid if it paid the federal 21% corporate tax rate.
- The OBBBA reinstated “100% bonus depreciation,”, which allows “companies to deduct the full cost of new equipment — such as servers for AWS and AI or warehouse robotics — in the year it’s purchased rather than spreading the deduction over many years.” This will be a massive boon as Amazon plans to spend $220 billion in 2026 to build out its AI infrastructure.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.