How much is your dignity worth? It seems that Jeff Bezos got paid for at least a billion dollars. According to a Wall Street Journal reportBezos has been sucking up to Donald Trump in not-so-subtle ways since the beginning of his second term as president, and all that adulation has apparently been quite lucrative for his rocket company. blue origin.
There are two different explanations in the Journal article: One is an estimate of the large amount of money Bezos’ companies have accumulated through government contracts since Trump took office for the second time and adopted a more favorable view of the Amazon founder. The second is how Bezos allegedly got Trump to adopt a favorable opinion of him and his companies.
Let’s start with the first one. For the Wall Street JournalThe Trump administration has had a real soft spot for Bezos’ Blue Origin, the billionaire’s aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company that competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Blue Origin has reportedly racked up $1.1 billion in federal contracts since Trump took office again in 2025, almost as much as the company managed to secure during the entire four years of the Biden administration.
That includes contracts for things like $78 million from the Space Force expand the capacity of its space vehicles and $188 million from NASA to deliver payloads to the Moon’s South Pole as part of the Artemis Program, which aims to return humans to the Moon. Blue Origin will likely increase that total in the coming years as well. Earlier this year, the Trump administration gave the company approval to compete for new contracts such as the Department of Defense’s “Golden Dome” anti-missile shield program.
As the Journal points out, Blue Origin barely did business with the Pentagon before Trump, so its approval is probably a blessing, given that the administration is currently pursuing the largest defense budget in the country’s history.
So how did Bezos manage to get the government to take a new interest in his company? It seems the answer is good old-fashioned servility, according to the Journal.
Some of Bezos’s brazen sycophancy has been documented before. We knew that his other company, Amazon, contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and spent 40 million dollars buying the rights to a Melania Trump documentarywhich allegedly earned Trump $10.71 million of a license fee. We also knew that Amazon was one of the contributors to Trump’s ongoing ballroom project.
But WSJ has some new details which have less to do with money changing hands and more to do with Bezos supposedly becoming Trump’s lapdog. The newspaper documented how Bezos apparently sat in the front row and laughed too loudly at every part of a rambling Trump speech he gave earlier this year at the Alfalfa Club, an elite invitation-only social group. He also noted that Trump apparently invites Bezos to events regularly and has invited him to at least one private dinner. The two also reportedly text each other quite a bit, but we knew that since Trump apparently likes show how tech executives, including Bezos, end up crawling through your inbox.
It must be recognized that the strategy seems to have worked. Blue Origin not only participates in government contracts, but according to the newspaperTrump has also begun telling advisers that he wants to put Bezos’ company on the moon and award it contracts to help it achieve that goal. Of course, no amount of government support really matters if your The rockets explode on the launch pad.—But that really seems like a secondary goal behind making cash.
