hola play Jeff Bezos, a Past Trump Foe, Is Optimistic About a Second Term

Does Jeff Bezos fear President-elect Donald J. Trump? Quite the contrary.

Mr. Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder, who also owns The Washington Post, offered his most extensive comments to date about Mr. Trump’s return to power at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday. He praised Mr. Trump’s deregulatory agenda, and the leadership of Elon Musk, who is set to be the president-elect’s partner in cost-cutting.

“I’m very hopeful — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation,” Mr. Bezos said of Mr. Trump. “And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.”

Mr. Bezos’s views on the president elect have been repeated by other DealBook Summit speakers, including Kenneth Griffin of Citadel.

Mr. Bezos fought plenty with Mr. Trump from 2016 to 2020 over everything from headlines in The Post to Amazon’s tax payments. But Mr. Bezos said he believed that Mr. Trump had “grown” over the past eight years.

“What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled,” he said.

Mr. Bezos has generally espoused a centrist political ideology, although he has taken pains to avoid being politically outspoken. Many business leaders at the event evinced a similar optimism about what a Trump presidency could mean for everything from deal activity to tax cuts. But Mr. Bezos’s comments were still somewhat striking given his well-known tensions with Mr. Trump for much of his first term.

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