Photo:
jason redmond/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
For years,
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN 1.93%
Chief Executive
Jeff Bezos
has meticulously crafted his public image, largely shunning the spotlight while carefully making donations that only hint at his political agenda.
But over the past week, the billionaire has been cast into the limelight thanks to a string of attacks by President
Donald Trump.
Mr. Bezos’s response? The silent treatment.
In six tweets over a week, Mr. Trump lashed out at Amazon repeatedly over taxes, its use of the U.S. Postal Service and its effect on other retailers. He also called the Washington Post, which Mr. Bezos owns personally, a lobbying arm. He criticized Amazon at a press conference on Tuesday, too, and aboard Air Force One on Thursday.
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The tweets and remarks stem largely from Mr. Trump’s growing unhappiness with coverage of his administration by the Washington Post as well as with its owner, say the president’s advisers and people close to the White House.
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Mr. Bezos, the world’s richest man, has ignored the president’s attacks. He has stayed out of the public eye since Mr. Trump’s tweets started last week, only tweeting once to send condolences regarding the recent shooting at YouTube’s headquarters.
Mr. Bezos made comments critical of Mr. Trump before the election, but he has refrained from public criticism since Mr. Trump was elected. That strategy, people familiar with this thinking say, fits in with his deeply held conviction in playing the long game.
“I don’t think there’s any benefit to actually engaging with President Trump” as a CEO, says
Paul Argenti,
professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. “He clearly doesn’t like them,” he said of Mr. Trump’s view of Amazon. “There’s no sense in fighting back.”
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment. The White House also declined to comment.
Some CEOs have spoken up after Mr. Trump has criticized them or their companies.
Facebook Inc.
Chief Executive
Mark Zuckerberg
in a September post refuted Mr. Trump’s tweet that “Facebook was always anti-Trump.”
AT&T Inc.
CEO
Randall Stephenson
hinted at the president’s criticism of the company’s merger plans at a November conference, saying the company wouldn’t back down in its bid for
Time Warner Inc.
Other CEOs, such as
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s
Lloyd Blankfein,
have publicly criticized the president in response to positions such as his ban on travelers from certain countries.
Mr. Bezos has long tread carefully when it comes to politics. The chief executive has made calculated public donations, like one for so-called Dreamer scholarships in January. He tweets rarely and chooses to speak publicly only on occasion. His last major public interview was granted to his brother on stage at a conference in November.
Still, as concerns about Amazon’s growing power have ballooned in recent months, Mr. Bezos has been seen more publicly. He starred in the company’s Super Bowl commercial this year and has been making the rounds at Hollywood award shows and parties. Last month, he tweeted a photo of himself with a robotic dog at his exclusive Mars conference in Palm Springs, Calif.
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Mr. Bezos was critical of Mr. Trump in the months before the election. In 2015, Mr. Bezos responded to a critical tweet from Mr. Trump by suggesting he could offer the then-candidate a ride on a spaceship. “#sendDonaldtospace,” he added. At a conference in 2016, shortly before Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Bezos said the candidate “erodes democracy around the edges.” Amazon became one of the first companies to sign on to a legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s travel ban last year, too, as Mr. Bezos sent an email to staff explaining his move.
Executives inside Amazon say they are well aware of the perception of the company’s growing dominance as it expands into new business areas globally and weaves its ways into consumers’ lives—from its Whole Foods grocery stores and Hollywood studios to its recent experimentation with health care and financial services. The company has recently worked to improve its public image and its lobbying efforts, according to a person familiar with the matter. And it has made big splashes by announcing it was creating tens of thousands of jobs, including at a new second headquarters.
Policy experts and analysts say that there is little Mr. Trump could do right now to more heavily regulate Amazon.
While the company’s share price dipped as much as 8% on fears of Mr. Trump last week, it has started to recover and some analysts and investors say they expect the stock to rebound once the president moves on.
It is largely business as usual inside Amazon, people familiar with the matter say. Mr. Trump’s tweets are a topic of conversation but they haven’t raised too much concern, these people say. While the dip in the stock price has resulted in some annoyance among the rank and file, most are ignoring the flood of tweets with the expectation it will end soon, one of the people said.
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Senior executives have remained calm, in large part due to the company’s years of experience with wildly fluctuating stock prices, one of the people said.
Part of that calm stems from Mr. Bezos’s focus on the company’s long-term value, a theme he hits on frequently at meetings and in his annual letter to shareholders. At all-hands meetings with employees, Mr. Bezos has quoted
Benjamin Graham
: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s tweets seem to come in response to Washington Post articles he disliked, the people close to the White House said. Washington Post Chief Executive and Publisher
Fred Ryan
said this week that the newspaper operates completely independent of Mr. Bezos on news and editorial decisions.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump criticized a headline in the “Fake News Washington Post, Amazon’s ‘chief lobbyist.’”
“Typically bad reporting!” he added in the tweet.
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com and Peter Nicholas at peter.nicholas@wsj.com
The post Slammed by Trump, Amazon's Jeff Bezos Chooses Silence appeared first on trend views word.
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