Well I mean the most generous take would be that he's come around about Trump and has decided that the editorial board making an explicit endorsement for Harris isn't in his own (or the country's) interests.

On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.

No need to speculate. It’s in black and white: last time Trump wanted to spite Bezos, he canceled $10Bn in AWS contracts. This is profit driven, plain and simple.

> In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure ... to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.

Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindictive as to cancel contracts with political opponents for spite, but we’re talking about Trump here. It would be best if you woke up to this reality.

It's certainly possible, though if he truly felt pressured that way, he could do a lot more than waiting until 11 days before an election to simply withhold an endorsement.

Like what?

You know all the stuff Musk has been doing with Twitter since buying it? That.

Or, just to throw out a few ideas: insist on more conservative people on their editorial board. Insist on endorsing Trump (rather than simply not endorsing). Insist that more pro-Trump stories be covered, and fewer pro-Harris ones.

Or, if all of that is too far, just sell the paper and get out of the way.

Any of these makes more sense than simply waiting until the last minute to enforce the withholding of an endorsement if the genuine goal is to avoid being targeted in the event Trump wins.

I think this is a last-minute hedge: a lot of people did not expect the Republicans to shield Trump from prosecution as effectively as they did (including the SCOTUS majority being willing to invent an unprecedented reversal of U.S. legal precedent) and weren’t expecting him to actually win again.

Now there’s a roughly even chance that he’ll do so and that’s causing some hard calculations: if Harris wins, they won’t face retribution because Democratic administrations don’t do that. If Trump wins, Bezos and Soon-Shiong can go to him saying that they got rid of the liberals at their companies in a very public display of support.

Trump is an authoritarian at heart: he doesn’t care if you like him, he cares if you support his power. Vance used to be a harsh critic but got the VP position by publicly recanting and displaying obeisance. It really looks like they’re thinking along the same lines: either it won’t matter or he’ll be satisfied with their acceptance of his power since he really wants to attack other people who aren’t fellow rich men.

Jumping up and down like a lunatic.

All the more reason to endorse his opponent!