'Something snapped': Nixed multi-billion dollar contract reportedly made Bezos Trump's man

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, has perplexed D.C. insiders with his dramatic transformation from civic-minded entrepreneur to MAGA faithful, according to a new piece in Politico.

Bezos was famously pictured alongside fellow tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk at Trump's second-term inauguration, cementing what Politico columnist Michael Schaffer wrote was an image that looked "more self-serving than selfless."

"The man who once praised democracy’s guardrails has begun to look like he’s just another rich guy trying to curry favor with a transactional president," Schaffer wrote.

He quoted one Washington observer who said of Bezos, “People say it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Something snapped with him.”

Schaffer recounted how Bezos once refused to get involved with editorial decisions at The Post, before changing his tune completely.

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"Even after Joe Biden became president and Bezos felt moved to criticize him about taxes, he did so on his personal social media, leaving the pages of the newspaper to professional journalists," Schaffer wrote, quoting a 2018 interview where Bezos maintained, “I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red. It would feel icky; it would feel gross.”

But all that changed when Bezos "overruled his editors to kill a long-planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and ditch the Post’s tradition of bipartisan opinions."

Schaffer traced Bezos's metamorphosis to a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract Amazon lost to Microsoft, ostensibly because "Trump didn’t like the Post’s coverage."

"The whiplash has caused chaos at the Post, which has seen an exodus of top talent and come under sharp criticism from onetime loyalists like former editor Martin Baron, whose memoir depicted Bezos as standing steadfast in the face of very real financial pressure from the first Trump administration," Schaffer wrote, adding that Baron has since accused Bezos "of being driven by cowardice in the face of White House intimidation."

According to Schaffer, Bezos did not offer a comment for the piece.

Read the Politico story here.