Bezos put in spot he’s avoided
Amazon CEO, defender plans to testify before Congress for 1st time
WASHINGTON — In September, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, rattled off terrifying statistics about the warming planet from the storied National Press Club, two blocks from the White House. Then he said he had something exciting to announce.
But when he uncovered a towering sign with the news, Amazon’s name was nowhere in sight. Instead, the sign introduced the Climate Pledge, a project to reduce carbon emissions from companies. Yes, Amazon would be the first, and at the time only, signatory. But this was a bigger push, Bezos said.
It was Amazon something grander.
The event reflected Bezos’ approach to the nation’s capital. He has jumped at opportunities to cast himself as a statesman — the savior of The Washington Post, who holds court among the country’s elite. At the same time, he has eschewed the day-to-day grind of bolstering Amazon’s influence with policymakers.
But that changes Wednesday, when Bezos testifies before Congress for the first
news,
couched
as time. He will be joined by the chief executives of Alphabet, Apple and Facebook as part of lawmakers’ investigations into the power of the largest tech companies. He is expected to face an onslaught of critiques, with questions as varied as Amazon’s labor conditions and market power and his status as the richest person in the world. It’s the kind of appearance that Bezos had avoided.
“It’s not traditional lobbying,” Steve Case, the AOL co-founder, said of how Bezos, whom he considers an old friend, had approached Washington until now. “It is much more of a longer-term relationship-building — a little bit of a reputationbuilding — effort that has to be sustained over decades.”
He arrived in Washington with a splash in 2013, when he bought The Post from its longtime owners for $250 million and gave the paper new life. In 2016, Bezos bought the biggest home in the city, a 27,000square-foot manse that used to be a museum in the Kalorama neighborhood, where former President Barack Obama and other political leaders live.
While Bezos’ presence in the city grew, so did Amazon’s, as it began pouring money into the traditional modes of influencing policymakers. It spent $16.8 million on federal lobbying in 2019, up from less than $10 million in 2015, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics. Last year, it gave $11.1 million to think tanks and associations, more than twice as much as the previous year, according to its disclosures. In 2018, it selected Crystal City, Virginia, a Metro train ride away from Washington, as the site of its second headquarters.
But Bezos has avoided high-profile meetings with his company’s sharpest critics, like the one that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, held a few weeks ago with organizers of an ad boycott of his company. Bezos has not made a habit of glad-handing worried lawmakers, the way that Sundar Pichai, who runs Alphabet, Google’s parent company, did in 2018. And unlike Tim Cook of Apple, Bezos has not developed a close relationship with President Donald Trump.
When Trump was still a long-shot candidate, Bezos tweeted that he wanted to “#sendDonaldtospace.” But since Trump’s election, Bezos has remained quiet even as the president attacked The Post, stating, without providing evidence, that the paper was doing Amazon’s bidding. The newspaper is owned privately by Bezos, not Amazon.
Even as the concerns of politicians became more pronounced, Amazon resisted sending Bezos before Congress. The company agreed to send him after lawmakers threatened to subpoena his testimony.