OPINION:
America’s second-richest man is excited about the new direction the country is taking in January. In an interview at the DealBook Summit last week, Jeff Bezos appeared pleased with the outcome of November’s election — a sign of the increasing appeal of making America great again.
“I’m super optimistic,” the Amazon founder said. “I’m very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda. … If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”
Mr. Bezos invited criticism from the left when he declined to embrace Vice President Kamala Harris and her doomed presidential bid. Complainers insisted his sole motivation was protecting his rocket company, Blue Origin, from punishment from the incoming administration.
This is not persuasive. Anyone worth $240 billion is going to survive the next four years, no matter who’s in the Oval Office. Mr. Bezos naturally dismisses concern that his main competitor in the space race, Elon Musk, would use the informal waste-busting panel dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency to boost Blue Origin’s rival, SpaceX.
“I think it’s going to be great — I’m hoping,” Mr. Bezos said.
This represents a major shift for someone with a long record of advancing left-wing causes. The Bezos Earth Fund has distributed hundreds of millions to groups that perpetuate climate change hysteria and oppose affordable sources of energy.
On the cultural front, Mr. Bezos spent $250 million in 2017 to buy the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy so he could turn the novels into a television series for Amazon’s streaming video service. Tolkien once said his trilogy was a “fundamentally religious” work in its “story and symbolism.”
Mr. Bezos took a direct personal interest in its adaptation as “Rings of Power,” a billion-dollar endeavor. His son, a Tolkien fan, implored, “Dad, please don’t eff this up.”
“Rings” ditches Christianity and retells the timeless classic using all the modern leftist tropes. Its main character is an invincible woman surrounded by weak men. The original fantasy setting has been made multicultural for no reason other than to showcase diversity, equity and inclusion.
It flopped. In 2022, Nielsen reported the first season of “Rings” was the 15th most-watched original streaming series, beaten by the likes of “The Great British Baking Show.” Last year, Season 2 was clobbered by reruns of “Suits” and “Friends.”
One doesn’t need to be a business genius to realize leftism isn’t working; “those who fight reality lose,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his October op-ed declining to endorse Ms. Harris for president. “Reality is an undefeated champion.”
In place of conventional liberalism in his remarks last week, Mr. Bezos sounded like a supply-side Republican. “If you look at the national debt and how gigantic it is as a portion of [gross domestic product], these are real long-term problems, and the way we get out of them is by outgrowing them.”
The key to achieving that growth is, in his view, eliminating burdensome regulations and restoring American energy dominance. This opens the possibility that the Amazon chief could be in the early stage of a transformation similar to the one that turned Mr. Musk from Silicon Valley left-winger into one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most outspoken backers.
Mr. Bezos controls a vast philanthropic and media empire that is in desperate need of ideological balance. Along with his newspaper, The Washington Post, he has a movie studio, and he runs the largest host of content on the internet.
A change of outlook would be most welcome.
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