Dear John,

The billionaire owners of two major U.S. newspapers -- Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times -- have both prohibited their editorial staffs from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. The question is, why this shift in long-running policy now, with so little time before the election next week?

Both billionaires have ample reason to want to be on Trump’s good side should he win. Neither wants to be considered an “enemy within” and sent to Guantanamo -- but Bezos has an extra incentive: As the nation’s second richest man (worth $262 billion), behind billionaire Elon Musk (worth $271 billion), he runs the nation’s second most successful private space company: Blue Origin.

Bezos purchased the Post for $250 million in 2013, and this month, the Post lost 250,000 subscribers -- 10% of its total base -- as a result of the decision. Musk purchased Twitter (changing the name to X) for $44 billion in 2022, and bought himself 202 million followers. It is now estimated that the value of X has fallen by 80% since Musk bought it.

What’s the connection between Bezos preventing the Post from endorsing Harris and Musk weaponizing X for Trump? Here’s a hint: Just hours after Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Harris, executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private rocket company, met with Trump in Austin.

Tell billionaire owners Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to stand up for freedom of the press by adding your name now!

Bezos’ Blue Origin competes with Musk’s SpaceX for Pentagon contracts, the best way for a fledgling space company to survive. While SpaceX has far larger contracts, Bezos is the most likely serious challenger to Musk’s dominance in space because of his personal fortune and his billions of dollars in government contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.

Now Bezos wants to take over the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint-venture rocket company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), with billions of dollars in government contracts. If that’s Bezos’ main goal, his biggest obstacle would be Trump, should Trump get back in the White House.

Trump has blamed Bezos for being covered unfavorably in the Post. In 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff told Blue Origin officials that they have a “Washington Post problem.” At the same time, Trump said he wanted to “screw Amazon” out of a $10 billion deal to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon.

Both Bezos' refusal to allow the Washington Post to endorse Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump can be seen as moves in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars -- thereby distending the fortunes of either Bezos or Musk.

But the casualty in this war is the will of the people, for which neither Bezos nor Musk seem to have a scintilla of concern. Both Bezos and Musk are poster boys for the importance of a wealth tax, which must be enacted to prevent the grotesque accumulations of wealth that have allowed them to wield such extraordinary power.

Dictators love self-censorship by the press, as it empowers them to limit the range of acceptable criticism. Silence empowers bullies to extend their dominance. Failing to make an endorsement suggests a false equivalency between Kamala and Trump, when in fact, one promises to defend democracy while the other has promised to be a “dictator on day one.”

This failure to assess what is at risk and what is in the public’s interest weakens the public’s trust. Readers cannot respect such a cowardly lack of conviction, or worse yet, support for the candidate whose misogyny, racial animus, and tendency to incite violence is established. The press must stand up against these disturbing trends.

Tell Bezos and Soon-Shiong to uphold their duties to democracy, and lift their bans on their papers’ presidential endorsements. Add your name now!

Thank you for standing up for freedom of the press and its obligations to the people!

Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action