{"id":568003,"date":"2026-07-04T03:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T03:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/568003\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T03:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T03:28:11","slug":"jeff-bezos-blue-origin-runs-on-sycophancy-to-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/568003\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Runs on Sycophancy to Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

How much is your dignity worth? It seems Jeff Bezos cashed his in for at least $1 billion. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, Bezos has not-so-subtly been sucking up to Donald Trump since the start of his second term as president\u2014and all that sycophancy has apparently been quite lucrative for his rocket company, Blue Origin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are two different accountings happening in the Journal\u2019s piece: One is an estimate of the sheer amount of money that Bezos\u2019 companies have amassed via government contracts since Trump took office for a second time and adopted a more favorable opinion of the Amazon founder. The second is how Bezos purportedly got Trump to adopt a favorable opinion of him and his firms.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the first. Per WSJ<\/a>, Trump\u2019s government has had a real soft spot for Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, the billionaire\u2019s aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company that competes with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Blue Origin\u2019s reportedly racked up $1.1 billion in federal contracts since Trump assumed office again in 2025\u2014nearly as much as the company managed to secure during the full four years of the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

That includes contracts for things like $78 million from Space Force<\/a> to expand the capacity of its space vehicles and $188 million from NASA<\/a> to deliver payloads to the moon\u2019s South Pole as part of the Artemis Program aimed at getting humans back to the moon. Blue Origin will likely be adding to that total in the coming years, too. Earlier this year, the Trump administration gave the company approval to compete for new contracts<\/a> like the Department of Defense\u2019s \u201cGolden Dome\u201d missile shield program.<\/p>\n

As the Journal notes, Blue Origin barely did business with the Pentagon pre-Trump, so its approval is likely to be a boon, given the administration is currently pursuing the largest defense budget in the country\u2019s history<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So how\u2019d Bezos pull off getting the government to have a newfound interest in his company? It looks like the answer is good, old-fashioned toadyism, according to the Journal.<\/p>\n

Some of Bezos\u2019 shameless obsequiousness has been documented before. We knew that his other company, Amazon, contributed $1 million to Trump\u2019s inauguration fund<\/a> and spent $40 million purchasing the rights to a Melania Trump documentary<\/a>, which reportedly netted Trump $10.71 million<\/a> from a licensing fee. We also knew that Amazon was one of the contributors to Trump\u2019s ongoing ballroom project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But WSJ has some new details<\/a> that are less about money changing hands and more about Bezos purportedly making himself into Trump\u2019s lap dog. The paper documented how Bezos apparently sat in the front row and laughed a bit too loudly at every part of a rambling Trump speech that he gave earlier this year to the Alfalfa Club, an invitation-only elite social group. It also noted that Trump seemingly invites Bezos to events on the regular and has hosted him for at least one private dinner. The two also reportedly text a fair amount\u2014but we did know that, as Trump apparently likes to show off how tech execs, including Bezos, end up groveling in his inbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To Bezos\u2019 credit, the strategy seems to have worked. Not only is Blue Origin rolling in government contracts, but according to the Journal<\/a>, Trump\u2019s also started telling advisors that he wants to see Bezos\u2019 company get to the moon and to award it contracts to help it achieve that goal. Of course, no amount of government support really matters if your rockets blow up on the launch pad<\/a>\u2014but that really seems like a secondary goal behind raking in cash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How much is your dignity worth? It seems Jeff Bezos cashed his in for at least $1 billion.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,27510,289,290,356,18,19,17,9791,82,1787],"class_list":["post-568003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-donald-trump","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-technology","tag-trump-administration"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116859588202431805","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}