STRICTLY BUSINESS
Jeff Bezos is worth over $200 billion dollars, one of the richest men in the world. Almost all of that fortune is from founding Amazon, a company that didn’t revolutionize business, it just figured out a way to take goods and services people buy anyway and deliver them faster and cheaper than anyone else.
Plenty of entrepreneurs become wealthy by hitting on a once-in-a-lifetime business idea. But the best of the lot don’t remain wealthy by resting on their laurels. In order to deliver value to shareholders, relationships must be built and maintained, both in the private and public sector.
Why is Elon Musk, he a rival of Bezos’s on “most rich” lists, supporting Donald Trump? It’s good for business. He can’t continue to build rocket ships and Teslas when government bureaucrats are breathing down his neck. A Trump presidency will call off the regulatory dogs and wisely, consult with Musk on what the new rules should be.
In 2022, Musk paid $44 billion for a social media site, Twitter. It was considered one of worst buyouts in history, Musk criticized by the financial press for overpaying. But he was playing the long game.
This election cycle, with his public campaigning for Trump and leveraging of TwitterX, we can see what Musk’s plan was all along. It’s business.
Bezos made waves this past week when the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, announced it would not be making a presidential endorsement. The decision was not editorially driven; orders came directly from the C-Suite. Bezos felt compelled to pen a letter to subscribers explaining the non-endorsement:
Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.
Bezos is spot on about distrust of media. His newspaper, the Washington Post, shoulders its fair share of blame. When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Post, like many legacy media outlets, couldn’t believe it. Its editors devoted countless resources in discrediting the results, reporting Trump’s victory as a function of Russian election interference. The Post essentially never recovered from those false claims and in 2023, lost $77 million. That’s a rounding error for a man of Bezos’s wealth, but he didn’t become one of the world’s richest men by being a moron.
Bezos’s editorial was around 900 words in length. Two words would have sufficed: it’s business.
Not Washington Post business. Bezos purchased the legacy brand 10 years ago as a platform to sell $100+ Prime subs, not with the expectation of large profits for “Democracy Dies In Darkness” pseudo-investigative journalism.
One of the storylines of the 2024 presidential race is the underwriting of Trump by Musk and other private-sector billionaires. Corporate media would like us to believe they are being held hostage by the former president; Trump extorting their endorsement in exchange for non-retribution once in office.
But these are serious business people. They and Trump live in the real world, where business relationships are for the most part, transactional. A Trump-controlled White House, combined with a GOP-led Congress, will boost company profits.
Those favorable postage rates Amazon receives for dropping off that expresso machine that costs us nothing? A pennies-per-package increase would cost the company billions. No one understands this better than Bezos. He knows a Harris endorsement from the Post will not be forgotten by the grudge-holding Trump, who just might leverage his public sector powers to open an anti-trust investigation. He hinted as much during his first term.
Bezos’s mistake is his falling-on-sword disingenuousness. Just be honest and say why the paper you own is not endorsing a candidate.
It’s business. Strictly business.
THE SIX
*Election Day is Tuesday, but early voting has been going on for weeks. How many Americans vote before election day, more Dems or Republicans? Gallup breaks down the data and reports how over 50% of registered voters say they have already voted or plan to before Nov. 5.
*It took 18 months, but Brandon Johnson has achieved a milestone unsurpassed in the rich, seedy history of Chicago politics. He’s now the most unpopular mayor ever, at least since they starting tracking favorability polling. It’s been a chaotic week at City Hall and Johnson’s incompetent leadership reveals how there’s no end in sight.
*Remember the days, not that long ago, when we’d locate our seat on the plane, then reach for the in-flight magazine? The best of those publications were always a mix of good travel writing and tips for finding cheap hotels. One of the most popular in-flight mag — Hemispheres, from United Airlines — published its final issue earlier this fall. Columbia Journalism Review with this article on the end of an era, beloved by many who thumbed through them, but such magazines could not survive the iPhone.
*Vending machines are already big business, an $18.2 billion industry in the U.S., with its 3 million machines typically generating around $525 per month in revenue. But we are beyond the days of just Hostess cupcakes and nacho cheese Doritos. As convenience becomes a premium, more and more sophisticated vending machines are coming online and getting rolled out throughout North America. According to this piece from Sherwood News, in the United States and Canada, the hot food vending machine sector is now worth $4.8 billion, and lots of robotics companies are coming up with ways to sling pasta, burgers and even groceries autonomously by vending machine.
*Over four years ago, legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen died. His brother, Alex Van Halen, who famously was the drummer in the band Van Halen, had not spoken publicly about his brother’s death. That changed with the publication of Alex’s memoir, “Brothers.” Known as a recluse who rarely speaks to the press, Alex Van Halen is granting interviews to help promote the book, now available on Amazon and other outlets. In this interview via The Guardian, Alex admits he’s still not over his younger brother’s death and the author calls the book “both a highly emotional read and a rich psychological portrait of a family dynamic that, in many ways, defined the lives of both sons.”
*Finally, in the waning days of this election cycle (thank goodness), a little humor is appropriate. A Trump victory will be good news for many Americans, including comedian Shane Gillis. Of all the impersonators of the former — and likely again — president, Gillis is the best. Enjoy this compilation.
Have a suggestion for The Kerr Report? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.
I seem to remember a Democratic mayoral candidate, who, after winning the nomination in the primary, was loathed by his own party. The vitriol was so over the top that Ed Vrdolyak, Ed Burke and many other Democrats issued a rallying cry for the general election - "Bernie Epton before it's too late."