Jeff Bezos Is Afraid Of What Comes Next

Last week Jeffrey Preston Bezos did a sad little interview (videos, transcript) with CNBC. In it, the well-steroided and plastic-faced oligarch tries to make his case that billionaires are just deeply misunderstood. It's clear Jeff is worried about popular, progressive post-Trump reforms eating into his fat stacks of cash.

At one point these are actual words that come out of his mouth:

You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you...you can’t connect those two things, not logically.

Sure thing, buddy.

Bezos tries to sell Andrew Ross Sorkin on the idea that he's been pushing hard to eliminate income tax for common people (he has not), pays his fair tax of tax obligations (he does not) and isn't the type of man to make his employees skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles so they can meet brutal quotas (he is).

As the recent New Yorker profile on Sam Altman makes clear, you don't get this rich without a certain sociopathy that heavily features telling people whatever they want to hear. Elon Musk and Altman have recently been telling people that the billionaires support universal basic income. They don't. Not really.

Jeff's not willing to go that far, but he would very much like it if you believed he spends a lot of time thinking whether or not nurses in Queens should pay income tax:

SORKIN: You’ve heard Sam Altman talk about the need for universal, potentially universal basic income. There’s a question, by the way, this gets maybe to the wealth, about the concentration of wealth.

BEZOS: Instead of universal basic income, how about we stop taxing nurses who make $75,000 a year? We don’t need to give her universal income yet—

SORKIN: Right.

BEZOS: Let’s just stop taking money away from her.

Bezos had never mentioned this support for eliminating income taxes for lower earners before. There's zero evidence he's actually pushing for this as meaningful, real policy through his vast influence operations. But his comments were enough to create an entire "CEO said a thing!" newscycle across our shitty press:

These are just words. They don't actually mean anything. Billionaire support for genuine public interest reform evaporates when it comes time to craft real policy. In fact they fund elaborate, sophisticated machinery that works every day ensuring the creation of government policies that exclusively benefit the extraction class, harm labor, erode consumer protection, and dismantle corporate oversight.

There's a point in the CNBC interview where Bezos also pretends to be against corporate subsidies, something Sorkin doesn't challenge:

SORKIN:  Well, let me ask you about government policy, though, because the other piece of the argument is that the wealthy have extraordinary influence over government policy and have too much influence over government policy, by the way, over tax policy, over housing, over all of it.

BEZOS:  I, but what I would say is that we have way too much corporate welfare, way too much corporate subsidies. We have, there’s way too much influence in politics from business, in some cases, wealthy people who really focus on that, unions. There’s a bunch of people interfering in the political process.

It's estimated that somewhere around 10% of all the $180 billion in federal income tax subsidies for all publicly traded corporations in 2025 went to Amazon. Trump also just hijacked what could easily be billions in in infrastructure bill subsidies intended for rural fiber, and redirected it to Bezos' and Musk's satellite broadband companies in exchange for doing absolutely nothing differently.

The whole interview is a lovely example of U.S. corporate pseudo-journalism, where the interviewer doesn't really press very hard, or acknowledge foundational shared realities, such as the fact that the U.S. is being devoured by historically corrupt and racist authoritarianism. With Jeff Bezos' help.

Instead of pressing Bezos on Trump administration racism, extremism, and corruption, you get these weird little segments where Bezos just flatly refuses to acknowledge abject reality, and Sorkin lets him get away with it:

SORKIN: Two years later, we’ve had lots of wars and tariffs and all sorts of things that have happened since then. What do you think?

BEZOS: I think he has, I mean, I’m comparing him to his first term. And I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term...Trump has lots of good ideas and he has done a lot of, he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.

All sorts of things have happened. Like massive concentration camps for terrified minority children. Or poet moms and off duty nurses being shot in the face by an illegal masked gestapo staffed by unqualified racists. Or Iranian toddlers being carpet bombed. Real disciplined and mature stuff. Positively wild, old chap.

Later on, Bezos tries to claim that the terrible Melania propaganda puff piece Amazon produced had nothing to do with trying to please the President:

SORKIN: And there is a view among critics that say that part of what you have done or are doing is trying to placate the president, with either the sort of shift in the tone of what’s happening at the paper, or even some of the things that Amazon, the decision to make the documentary around Melania, for example.

BEZOS: Yes, the Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die...By the way, it appears it was a good business decision. You know, it did very well in theaters. It’s done very well on streaming. People are very curious about Melania. So even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision.

Maybe he even believes all this stuff about Trump. If he does, he's dangerous and delusional. If he doesn't, he's a liar and a coward. Imagine having that much money and still finding it necessary to cower to a comb-over trust fund bigot who operates at a fourth-grade reading level.

As "CEO said a thing!" journalism routinely demonstrates, there's really no meaningful value in interviewing these sorts of men. They're morally inclined (in fact legally obligated) to not be truly honest about anything. You're basically interviewing a living commercial. You're better off conversing with a lamp.

It's especially pointless if the interviewer isn't willing to press them and make them uncomfortable. And you're not going to land this kind of interview if you're the type of journalist actually capable of that. It's strange and useless performance art that helps MBA #hustlebros ignore ethics and pretend they're informed.

Twenty years ago billionaires could trust corporate TV media to parrot their flimsy defenses of widespread predation with some effectiveness. But with the rise of social media, most people's view of Bezos' sad little interview came in the form of viral social media snippets that mercilessly ridiculed him for being a clod.

There's a "fun" segment in the interview where Bezos also demonstrates that he doesn't understand how public interest journalism works. Bezos has a net worth of $223 billion. He owns the Washington Post and could easily keep that newsroom healthy and funded for a century without breaking a sweat.

Instead, he drove the paper's editorial slant further right, put a bunch of gargantuan losers in charge, began publishing lazy class agitprop, and then fired 300 journalists to compensate for a mass reader exodus.

Sorkin asks him a basic question about this managerial incompetence, and Bezos makes it clear that journalism as a non or low-profit public interest venture is completely alien to him:

SORKIN:  I was asking you about the news market.

BEZOS:  Yeah.

SORKIN:  Because you own “The Washington Post”.

BEZOS:  Yes.

SORKIN:  And one of the critiques, by the way, and this is, this is maybe the wealth critique and everything else is, you know, we just you, the company laid off about 30 percent of its staff.

BEZOS:  Yeah.

SORKIN:  And there’s a lot of people out there who said, Jeff’s super wealthy. He’s talked about this being a public trust. That’s something that he bought early on. How much do you care about that piece of it? Why, why lay people off? Why fire people? Why don’t you subsidize the business if in fact—

BEZOS:  Because “The Post” needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. It needs to be.

It doesn't need to be. In fact, any media scholar worth their salt will tell you that in the wake of the U.S. corporate press' embarrassing capitulation to fascism, it's long past time for the U.S. to start considering journalism as a non (or minimal) profit, subsidized, collaborative public good.

I'm beating a dead horse, but our ad-based consolidated corporate media doesn't serve the public interest. It generally exists to prop up the financial interests of the ownership class. Sometimes real journalism still spontaneously erupts from within that framework, but it's becoming less and less common as the rich extend control.

Even if we were locked into the inevitable gravitational physics of the Post needing to be "pure business," there's zero indication Jeffrey Bezos knows what he's doing.

Bezos recently fired all of the paper’s black opinion columnists, censored a cartoonist that criticized him, and proudly announced the paper's op-ed section would now be a safe space for corporatist race and class agitprop, equal parts cultural misinformation and lazy engagement trolling.

He decided, in all of his business savvy, to create a newspaper full of weird sycophants that panders primarily to the deep delusions of ethically-disoriented rich right wing trust fund boys. A paper very few people actually want to read. He's selling you dead and dying narratives in pathetic service to unpopular kings.

You're going to see a lot of this sort of thing in the months to come. Especially as Trump's incontinence soars, his political power wanes, and the policy world increasingly tries to envision what comes next.

What Bezos and friends don't want is this golden age of corruption and bigotry to usher forth a violent pendulum swing toward good faith popular progressive reform. They don't want a whole bunch of AOCs and Zohran Mandamis running around getting young people excited about equitable taxation and functional regulators.

So the extraction class, with broad center-right corporate media support, is going to endlessly spoon feed you fake alternatives to popular progressive reform in the hopes of pre-empting real change. The campaign is going to be utterly relentless and varied over the next few years. It's already underway.

Universal basic income plans that morph into something mad and unworkable when you take a closer look. Ambiguous calls for deregulatory "abundance" by podcast hosts who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Platitudes about lower-income tax relief that disappear as quickly as they mysteriously arrived.

Anything but real, tangible, popular reforms to a system that threw the working class and the public interest in the drink forty-five fucking years ago and never looked back. Bezos tried to help; but because, like most billionaires, he's not all that competent and deluded by sycophancy, he made an embarrassing mess.