Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the billions of ways to influence an election

By David Streitfeld

 

Entrepreneurs become legends when they make big bets on technology that pay off in a huge and dramatic way. Elon Musk is now applying that all-or-nothing philosophy to a presidential election, tying his reputation and perhaps his future to a win by Donald J Trump.

 

Jeff Bezos, the reigning swashbuckler of the internet age until  Musk came along, was playing a cooler game, content to let Musk take the headlines and the risk. Then last week  Bezos ventured — well, stumbled — into the heart of the news.

 

Among his many properties is The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013. The paper’s editorial board was preparing to recommend the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, when  Bezos canceled the endorsement at the last minute.

 

It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, just a ho-hum announcement of something not happening. Instead the greatest salesperson of the era, whose customer obsession had made Amazon into a colossus of modern retail, got the greatest customer rejection of a lifetime.

 

A quarter-million Post readers canceled their subscriptions, a figure first reported by NPR and then by The Post itself. That is about 10 percent of the total circulation. The speed and decisive force of the cancellations was a bit of a shock but also weirdly appropriate, said Danny Caine, author of “How to Resist Amazon and Why.”

 

“Amazon invented the whole notion of one-click culture, where you click a button and there’s a bunch of toilet paper on your porch,” he said. “You can’t get rid of a Tesla in your driveway with one click. But you can with the newspaper that Jeff Bezos owns.”

 

Those canceling said they felt Bezos was trying to curry favor with  Trump, a charge he denied. The furor immediately exceeded any damage incurred by Musk since he endorsed Trump in July and became the former president’s most visible fan, cheerleader and acolyte.

 

If customers are rejecting the electric vehicles made by  Musk’s  Tesla, for political reasons, it hasn’t clearly shown up in the sales numbers. Musk implicitly dismissed the notion on X on Tuesday, reposting an admirer’s note that said it wasn’t happening.

 

Musk,  Bezos and other extremely rich people are confronted with unusual opportunities and invisible perils in the tightest, most dramatic, chaotic and highest stakes political battle in modern times. Everyone has a stake in this election, of course, but the very wealthy have so much at stake — or at least think they do — that they are perhaps inevitably trying to shape it, too.

 

There has always been money in politics, and rich people who sought their reward in Washington. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first cabinet was known as “eight millionaires and a plumber.” But until recently, it was literally considered bad business for successful public figures to declare favourites too stridently and make too many demands.

 

Michael Jordan established the standard for many celebrities in 1990. The basketball superstar, who went to college in North Carolina, was asked about whether he would endorse Harvey Gantt, the Black candidate running to dethrone Jesse Helms, the Republican senator with a long opposition to civil rights. “Republicans buy sneakers, too,”  Jordan said Helms narrowly beat Gantt.

 

Jordan later said it was an off-the cuff remark, a joke even, but he did not really back away from it. “I never thought of myself as an activist,” he said. “I thought of myself as a basketball player.”

 

Many billionaires now are activists. One reason is there are more of them — the ranks of US billionaires are up 38 percent by one estimate since  Trump first took office in 2016 — and they have even more money. For all the specter of antitrust and regulation, life has been very good for the rich and their companies. The stock market is perpetually at a record high.

 

Even this ocean of money has a limit, however. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who ranks just behind  Musk and  Bezos as one of the richest men in the world, last year backed the presidential aspirations of Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican.

 

Ellison came up with the funding for his candidate but was otherwise quiet. Musk is anything but reticent and has become a full-scale surrogate for Trump, as well as one of his biggest donors. Speaking at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday,  Musk told the crowd, “We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.” Musk would no doubt like to get the government off his own back. His companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, are the subject of over 20 investigations or reviews, a New York Times examination found.