New York
CNN
 — 

Jeff Bezos hopes Donald Trump has changed.

Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, the billionaire Amazon founder and Washington Post owner said he hopes that a second Trump administration will look more favorably on the press, saying he will “try to talk [Trump] out of” the idea that journalists are an enemy.

“I don’t think the press is the enemy,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin. “The press is not the enemy, let’s go persuade him of this.”

While Trump famously targeted Bezos and his companies during his first term, Bezos said he was “very optimistic” about a second Trump administration and suggested he even wants to help the incoming president.

“I am very optimistic this time around, I am very hopeful, he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I am going to help him,” he said of Trump.

During Trump’s first administration, he railed against Bezos and Amazon, called the Post “The Fake News Washington Post” and derided the paper as Amazon’s “chief lobbyist.” Trump accused the e-commerce giant of failing to pay its share of taxes and his administration blocked Amazon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon, which was widely seen at the time as Trump seeking retribution against Bezos over the Post’s reporting.

“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” Bezos said Wednesday. “He has, too.”

Bezos, speaking publicly for the first time since he vetoed The Post’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, defended the controversial move, saying, “I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly.”

Bezos’ decision to end presidential endorsements at The Post just two weeks before Election Day sparked intense backlash from its reporters and readers alike, resulting in the resignation of nearly one-third of the paper’s editorial board and 250,000 readers canceling their subscriptions. Current and former staffers also accused the Amazon founder of engaging in “anticipatory obedience.”

Asked if he had anticipated the firestorm the decision set off, Bezos said, “We knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way, these things punch above their weight.”

In an op-ed published three days after the newspaper announced the decision, Bezos cited the need for a “credible, trusted, independent voice,” which he reiterated on stage Wednesday, claiming the benefits of a presidential endorsement were too small to be worth adding “to the perception of bias.”

“We’re struggling with the issue that all traditional media is struggling with, which is a very difficult and significant loss of trust,” Bezos said.

Asked if potential retribution against his other companies, including Amazon and the space exploration firm Blue Origin, factored into the decision to block the endorsement, Bezos said “that was certainly not in my mind.”

“The Post covers all presidents very aggressively, is going to continue to cover all presidents very aggressively, and this endorsement or non-endorsement is a drop in the bucket,” he said.

“I am a terrible owner of the Post from the point of view of [an] appearance of conflict, he said.

The Washington Post, which Bezos acquired in 2013 for $250 million, has struggled in the face of dwindling audience traffic and subscriptions. But Bezos suggested Wednesday he has a plan to turn around the newspaper’s fortunes.

“I have a bunch of ideas, and I’m working on that right now. And I have a couple of small inventions there,” he said. “So we’ll see.”

Bezos’ comments come as tech executives have begun seeking to engage with Trump, including around tech policy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also seeking an “active” role in policy discussions with Trump’s team, an executive for the company said this week.

At the summit Wednesday, Bezos said he is not concerned about the relationship between billionaire Elon Musk – whose SpaceX competes with Bezos’ Blue Origin and xAI competes with Amazon’s AI efforts – and Trump. He said that he takes at “face value” Musk’s commitments that he will not use his political power against his corporate rivals.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also briefly commented on the incoming Trump administration in a separate interview during Wednesday’s event. Pichai said of his conversations with Trump, “he’s definitely very focused on American competitiveness, particularly in technology, including AI.”