Maybe but Bezos is not lacking money. That contract was $1B/yr contract over ten years. They make $600B+ a year. Not exactly going to tip the scales of his stock options.

These billionaires usually buy money losing newspapers, or social networks, for personal reasons. If I was going to bet on it I’d very much lean on a personal motive beyond money.

> They make $600B+ a year.

Are you confusing revenue with profit? Yeah, a lot of money pumps in one end of Amazon retail and out the other, but there is very little margin: the $550+ billion in revenue on the retail side, as I understand, brings in significantly less net than the $90 billion in revenue on the cloud side.

And government contracts, where one might expect support or opposition from a potential cheif executige who has made overt promises of purges and other uses of office to punish enemies and reward friends to make a big difference, are an important part of that (not just that one $1B contract.)

I say I make $100k year. That’s my salary, it’s my revenue. To do that I have to do things like paying taxes, rent, electric costs etc.

The $1B/yr is revenue too

...probably at a way lower profit range than most corporate contracts given how demanding gov deals are.

> a lot of money pumps in one end of Amazon retail and out the other, but there is very little margin

Citation needed

I thought they had fabulous margins

Am I wrong

Not lacking money does NOT imply not so obsessed with making more money that he will do absolutely anything.

A very easy decision for some, depending on their own strength of conviction. Anybody knows that Harris is not running to retaliate against those who do not agree with every policy that her people can get her party to support, but Trump is and he makes it very clear that if elected he intends to do harm that Harris will not do. Bigly.

So without consideration for upside[0], one of the most emotionless decisions a top executive can make is when there is no downside versus when there is.

[0] After all, further upside is not necessary if you already have experienced enough to where the needle can not move any further.

Its a general posture. Amazon is an industrial powerhouse and Trump has signaled that he can and will attack his political opponents no matter how rich they are. If he wants to, Trump may actually nationalize Amazon; the alternative is presumably becoming his toady.

See "the steel cases". The POTUS cannot unilaterally nationalize any businesses.

See Dobbs and Loper Bright, past precedent previously viewed as solid and well-established is no guarantee of future outcomes with this Court.

Or Brown vs. Board of Education. The courts can change their minds once in a while. There are no indicia that this court wants to overturn the steel cases.

More context? A search on Google doesn't bring anything useful to me.

My googling turned up this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._...

The current Supreme Court has been pretty clear that there is no such thing as settled case law anymore

> The current Supreme Court has been pretty clear that there is no such thing as settled case law anymore

It's always been the case. That's how Supreme Court works.

When did Trump threaten to nationalize any business ? His argument has always been for the opposite.

His behavior has been he’ll do whatever he wants; he has almost no consistent political positions.

Sorry, but no - if he has ever made an argument to nationalize a business (he has actually held the opposite position), you will need to explicitly bring that up instead of ascribing to an imaginary belief in your mind.

He makes arguments that change with the wind. If you haven’t been paying attention to his erratic behavior for the last eight years, that’s not something I can fix for you.

That is still reasonably stable. His opponent keeps changing her stance on border, fracking, medicare all the time depending on who is interviewing her - far faster than the wind actually. Amusingly, even on gun ownership these days.

AFAICT, while he has threatened extreme and unconstitutional retaliation against businesses (e.g., pulling broadcast licenses and jailing journalists for unfavorable coverage) [0] if he wins, he has not specifically threatened nationalization.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/22/nx-s1-5161480/trump-media-thr...

Fair enough. Though I wouldn't put it past him.

That’s the bar now?

Trump has signaled he will get the military involved against his opponents. And people are still going to vote for him.

And by the looks of it, the majority of people. Is this your signal that the majority of people are uneducated swines, or know something that you don’t?

> And by the looks of it, the majority of people.

Where are you getting this? He is down against Harris in most polls, and neither candidate is clearing a majority. There are projections that he has a narrow edge in winning the Presidency due to the electoral college, but that's not the same as being most likely to win a majority (or even plurality) of the votes (e.g., 538 gives Trump currently a 53% chance to win the electoral college, while Harris has a 65% chance to win the popular vote.)

Betting odds.

Betting on winner, or on popular vote? Because even assuming the betters have the odds right, those are not the same thing.

To me the popular vote is irrelevant and in my original post I meant the winner, despite saying the majority which you interpreted to mean “more than 50% of the population of the US”. We have a system in place to counterbalance the fact that large numbers of likeminded people concentrated in one area could otherwise rule over everyone else through tyranny of the majority. To me the majority therefore just means “most of the US”.

If you think betters do not have the odds right, you should start betting right now.

Using "majority of people" to mean anything but something over 50% of people is going to lead to miscommunication. I'd advise against it.

> If you think betters do not have the odds right, you should start betting right now.

Sure, depending on my risk tolerance and existing exposure.

Even the betting sites where Trump is extremely (as in, much more than in the poll-based forecast sites) favored to win the electoral college, like Polymarket, have Harris a strong favorite to win the most votes, just as the poll-based forecasts generally do.

E.g, Polymarket, which gives Trump a 65% chance to win the EC compared to 538s 53%, has Harris at 58% to win the popular vote compared to 538s 65%. (And while it is possible for the popular vote winner to have a mere plurality of votes, it is not possible to get a majority of votes and not be the popular vote winner, so, no, the source of evidence you cite does not support the claim that "by the looks of it, the majority of people" will vote are going to vote for Trump, but instead support that the majority will most likely not do so.)

At the end of the day, you will find this prediction markets to be as successful as sports betters. We would be wise to remove all money from politics.

Rational well managed sports betters are quite successful.

Paddy Power (as one example) has grown in 36 years to now have > £11 billion revenue per annum with a net income of some £1.2 billion.

"Trump has signaled that he can and will attack his political opponents"

You write this, apparently sincerely, as if the other side of politics do not and will not attack their political opponents.

> I think the implicit argument is that he wants to avoid more canceled contracts, along with other forms of retribution like personal attacks he experienced a few years earlier.

That makes no sense at all. If the primary concern was avoiding canceled contracts, it would be in his best interests to ensure that the guy who is threatening to cancel contracts out of spite would not be elected.

Pressuring the Washington Post to not endorse the candidate who does not pose that threat goes exactly against that.

It's something else.

It sure makes sense. The endorsement is extremely unlikely to decide the election. On the contrary, the chance that the endorsement will lead to retribution after a lost election is arguably much higher. They think it happened last time around. You can say it's cowardly to act like this. But it does make sense.

> say it's cowardly to act like this. But it does make sense.

So cowardice has been the greater virtue all along?

Has it come to this, that political cowardice makes sense? That it makes sense when Democracy itself is at risk?

That it makes sense in Journalism?

That it makes sense at the newspaper of Bob Woodward [1] , now run by a billionaire with no guts to stand for Democracy itself?

That other oligarchs are tilting the election towards the obvious insanity of a leader who, in word and deed, will dismantle Democracy to indulge himself and his cronies?

We have sanewashed madness and the end of Democracy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness

Yes this is the problem of oligarchies