Jeff Bezos in 2016. He bought The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013.
Credit...The Washington Post

Bezos Was Expected to Make a Splash in Washington. But He Never Arrived.

The billionaire made splashy purchases of The Washington Post and a mansion in Washington. But his status as a power player in the nation’s capital was never realized.

by · NY Times

A decade ago, Jeff Bezos was expected to make a splash in Washington.

In 2013, the Amazon founder bought The Washington Post for $250 million. Three years later, he became the owner of the city’s largest home, spending $23 million for two combined mansions fit to host lavish events for the capital’s elite. His status as Amazon’s originator and as an innovator with the rocket company Blue Origin was expected to help make him influential inside the Beltway.

But Mr. Bezos, 60, never really arrived.

In the intervening years, he stepped down from Amazon as chief executive and became a topic of tabloid fodder as he divorced his wife and went public with his relationship with Lauren Sánchez, now his fiancée. Mr. Bezos visited the nation’s capital only on occasion — primarily for glitzy events or company emergencies. He bought a $165 million Beverly Hills compound in 2020, setting a California record at the time, and finished building a 400-foot-long mega-yacht last year to sail the world. He has since moved to Miami.

The tech billionaire who is instead making waves in Washington is Elon Musk. Mr. Musk, 53, who leads SpaceX, Tesla and X, has increasingly been drawn to the city because of interest in artificial intelligence and his rocket company, SpaceX, which partners with NASA and competes with Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin. Tesla and SpaceX were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies, according to a New York Times analysis.

On Friday, Mr. Bezos made it clear that he was declining to get involved in Washington’s riptides. The Post announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate this year, breaking from a four-decade practice. It has become increasingly complicated for many titans of industry to navigate the political climate, particularly if their companies have federal contracts or provide other services to the government.

“Even as a C.E.O. of Amazon with a huge amount of regulatory issues, he was rarely seen in town,” Hilary Rosen, a Democratic political strategist and former Washington editor for The Huffington Post, said of Mr. Bezos. “I don’t know if he ever intended to be a business or media industry leader in D.C., but he certainly hasn’t become one.”

Mr. Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A spokeswoman for The Post said Friday that ending presidential endorsements was a “Washington Post decision.” In a statement on Saturday, Will Lewis, the paper’s chief executive and publisher, added that he did not believe in endorsements.

Mr. Bezos wasn’t always envisioned as a potential D.C. power player. The entrepreneur spent much of his career in Seattle after founding Amazon out of his garage in the Seattle area in 1994. He turned the e-commerce site into a juggernaut in online retail, online streaming, cloud computing and A.I.

After a decade, Amazon became one of the most valuable public companies and Mr. Bezos one of the richest people in the world. Today, his net worth is $211 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Mr. Bezos began deploying his wealth in different ways. In 2013, he bought The Post for $250 million, establishing him in Washington. Many in the newsroom feared he might interfere with the day-to-day operations of the paper — and influence its coverage of his e-commerce behemoth.

Mr. Bezos held a town hall in 2013 where he promised editorial independence, and that he would not stand in the way of critical coverage of Amazon. He said he would defer to the editorial board’s positions, which he said were already aligned with his politics.

“Don’t be boring,” he emphasized.

After that, he was largely invisible in the newsroom, a mysterious figure who met primarily with reporters who had won journalism awards, several current and former Post employees said.

In October 2016, Mr. Bezos bought a residence in Washington D.C., a 27,000-square-foot former textile museum. At the time, one of his aides said that Mr. Bezos wanted to be more involved in public affairs and to be closer to The Post. He also planned to host parties and salons, the aide said.

The purchase stoked anticipation that Mr. Bezos would cast himself in the mold of Katharine Graham, the distinguished Post publisher who backed the newsroom through its reporting on the Watergate scandal, which forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign. Ms. Graham’s home in Georgetown was a hub of Washington’s high society where she convened government officials, business leaders and celebrities.

“There was that assumption. He bought a big place. It seems to be set up to hold parties,” said Robert Allbritton, the former owner of Politico. “It’s like, ‘OK, maybe he’s just being more politically active now.’”

But Amazon was working at the same time to establish itself as a power player in Hollywood with its Prime Video offering. Mr. Bezos bought a home in Beverly Hills in 2007, as Amazon began expanding into entertainment.

Mr. Bezos’ Hollywood coming out was in 2016, when he gave a party — a lavish event in the context of awards season — to celebrate the Oscar favorite “Manchester by the Sea,” an Amazon Studios release. It was held at his mansion, high above Sunset Boulevard. The evening appears to be the first time that he and Ms. Sánchez, a former Los Angeles TV anchor, were publicly photographed together.

In 2019, Mr. Bezos and MacKenzie, his wife of 25 years, announced their plan to split. The next day, The National Enquirer reported that Mr. Bezos was romantically involved with Ms. Sánchez.

Mr. Bezos kept some semblance of a presence in Washington. He attended a 2019 gala thrown by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where the museum unveiled his portrait. In January 2020, he hosted an after-party for the annual Alfalfa Club dinner, a black-tie gathering of influential figures in business and politics. Mr. Bezos also gave $200 million to the Smithsonian in 2021, which will pay for a new educational center expected to bear his name and renovations to its National Air and Space Museum. Mr. Bezos later hosted a private V.I.P. black-tie dinner ahead of the National Portrait Gallery annual gala, inviting more than three dozen guests including Dolly Parton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But his huge home in Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood, walking distance from former President Barack Obama’s, is mostly quiet. Neighbors say they’ve rarely, if ever, seen Mr. Bezos there.

“He doesn’t live here,” Mr. Allbritton said.

In 2021, Amazon announced Mr. Bezos was stepping down as chief executive. Even when he was leading the company, he’d largely left Washington lobbying to Jay Carney, Amazon’s policy chief and a former White House press secretary, and other staff, according to two former Amazon employees.

And while Amazon in 2018 announced with great fanfare that it would form a second headquarters in Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington, the company paused development there last year.

Mr. Bezos started spending more time on Blue Origin, which has operations in Texas and Florida, taking the company’s first crewed trip to space in July 2021.

As Mr. Bezos stayed away, Mr. Musk grew his business empire and links to Washington. He has regularly visited senior lawmakers to press his views on A.I., electric vehicles, global satellite communications and space travel.

Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is light-years ahead of Blue Origin and has developed into an important federal contractor, providing transportation for NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.

In his personal life, Mr. Bezos has been increasingly busy. He proposed to Ms. Sanchez last year, and a Vogue feature in November kicked off with his margarita-making skills. “This is my backup career,” he joked.

Days before, Mr. Bezos had said in an Instagram post that after living in Seattle for years, he would be moving to Miami. He went on a real estate spending spree, buying three properties in Indian Creek, an island community where homeowners reportedly include Ivanka Trump and Tom Brady.

Mr. Bezos said he wanted to be near Blue Origin’s operations in Florida’s Cape Canaveral. “I want to be close to my parents,” he added, “and Lauren and I love Miami.”

Reporting was contributed by Benjamin Mullin, Katie Robertson and Kenneth Chang from New York and Brooks Barnes from Los Angeles.

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