How Bezos Learned to Love Trump—and Win More Contracts for Blue Origin

“Can we break up Amazon?” Trump asked in July 2017. “I hate this son of a bitch Jeff Bezos and I hate the Washington Post,” he said, referring to the billionaire founder and the newspaper he owned, according to the former aide, Anthony Scaramucci.

Few relationships have changed more for the president than that with Bezos, who has gone from an avowed enemy of the president to an energetic ally.

By early this year, when Trump spoke to the Alfalfa Club, an elite Washington group, the president annoyed some attendees with what they felt was a rambling, 45-minute speech that was too long and too vituperative. Bezos was sitting in the front, laughing uproariously.

Trump hosted Bezos for a private dinner in the Rose Garden last year, frequently asks whether he will be attending other events and talks and texts with him regularly.

In recent months, Trump has told advisers that he wanted to see Bezos get to the moon with his rocket company Blue Origin and make sure it gets related contracts, people familiar with the remarks said.

The company’s federal contracting work has accelerated sharply in Trump’s second term, a Wall Street Journal analysis of contracts awarded to the company and its affiliates shows, even though its rivals’ total contracts remain much larger.

Much of Blue Origin’s growth is being driven by earlier, broad NASA awards paying out as the company reaches key milestones as well as new contracts from the Defense Department—a market it had little presence in before Trump’s return to office.

In April 2025, Space Force, the branch of the military that protects U.S. interests in space, approved the company to launch seven military and intelligence-related missions valued at up to $2.4 billion. In October, Blue Origin won a three-year, $78 million defense contract to expand capacity for space vehicles at the force’s spaceport in Florida.

This year, in January, the government approved the firm to compete for work to support the Pentagon’s $151 billion missile shield project known as Golden Dome. And in May, NASA awarded Blue Origin a $188 million contract to deliver payloads to the moon’s South Pole ahead of human arrival—part of the long-term Artemis program that will take astronauts to the moon and potentially beyond.

Part of Bezos’ turnaround was a recognition, people close to him said, of the warm relationship with Trump that his primary rival in the space business, Elon Musk, had built. Musk, with his company SpaceX, could box Blue Origin out of the government contracts it needed unless Bezos made his own inroads with Trump’s team, the people said.

“You tell me what you would have done in October, November, December 2024 when your largest competitor was the main backer of the next president of the United States,” said Barry Diller, a friend of Bezos who is chairman of media conglomerate People Incorporated, formerly known as IAC. “This company depends on the government.”

Amazon gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and an undisclosed amount to help fund Trump’s ballroom, and it struck a $40 million deal to license a documentary about first lady Melania Trump.

People close to Bezos said Bezos came away from some of his one-on-one conversations with Trump thinking the president was less extreme and more charming than his public persona. “Trump has lots of good ideas,” Bezos said in an interview this May on CNBC from his space company. “He’s been right about a lot of things.”

Trump’s own clashes with Musk in mid-2025 led the president to turn toward Bezos, people close to him said.

After the public feud with Musk last year, Trump told allies and White House advisers that he wanted to see space contracts increasingly go to other companies instead of SpaceX, according to two people who heard the comments. The president told one of those people that he wanted to see Bezos benefit.

NASA administrator and former SpaceX pilot Jared Isaacman has publicly described Blue Origin as a key partner and counterbalance to Musk: “The best thing for SpaceX is a Blue Origin right on their heels, and vice versa,” he said at a confirmation hearing in December. Musk had recruited Isaacman for the NASA role, telling his friend—who flew to orbit with SpaceX and invested in the company—that they could make NASA great again and work toward their shared ambition of getting humans to Mars, the Journal has reported.

After Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded on the launchpad near Cape Canaveral, Fla., in May, Trump told aides he was surprised and disappointed, asking if the launchpad was damaged, why the uncrewed rocket exploded and whether the problems could be fixed for future flights, a senior administration official said. Space Force officials said at the time the program would work with Blue Origin to identify and correct the problem, and they immediately announced expanded work for the company.

Government decisions are also breaking Amazon’s way—Bezos is still the company’s executive chairman and largest shareholder. Contracts to Amazon Web Services’ cloud business reached a record $389 million during the first year of Trump’s term, up about 54% from Biden’s final year in office. Pentagon contracts drove the increase, accounting for nearly 80% of the year’s total.

Much of the first-term feuding between Trump and Bezos revolved around the Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013. Trump accused him of using the paper to unfairly assail his presidency. More recently, Bezos ushered in dramatic changes at the paper that included scuttling an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president and laying off one-third of its staff, which changed the dynamic between the two men.

“Amazon is the source of his wealth, and Blue Origin is the object of his passion, and the Washington Post is neither of those,” the former executive editor of the paper, Martin Baron, said.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump wasn’t giving Bezos special treatment. The president is “committed to working with every American business and business leader,” Desai said, adding that Trump is a friend and ally to industry leaders in a range of industries, including automobiles, pharmaceuticals and tech.

Amazon and Blue Origin didn’t comment, and NASA declined to comment. A Defense Department official referred to announcements of Blue Origin contracts, which said the deals would expand capabilities and drive down technology costs related to cloud services.

New Glenn didn’t achieve its first launch until 2025. Even so, Blue Origin landed big wins during President Joe Biden’s administration. NASA awarded Blue Origin one of its largest contracts, worth up to $3.4 billion, to design and develop a lunar lander.

SpaceX also won a contract eventually worth up to $4.1 billion for the moon program, among other contracts, during the Biden years.

During the 2024 campaign, Musk became a prominent proxy for Trump, camping out in Pennsylvania to gin up votes and getting name checked during Trump’s rallies. During the transition, Musk sat in on meetings and interviews with candidates for cabinet positions, joined Trump’s calls with foreign leaders and recruited friends and allies for crucial positions in the government.

SpaceX had a sizable lead in the industry, and Blue Origin executives worried it would only continue to grow under Trump at their expense. Musk’s company was also adding big Pentagon projects.

But even though Blue Origin’s total contracts are much smaller, they have grown faster in the past year than those of its rivals, according to the Journal’s analysis of federal contracts.

In the space business, broad contracts can be announced with ceiling values often set intentionally high to support future modifications of the deal, with actual payouts dependent on individual contracts for portions of the program that can be negotiated later. For its analysis, the Journal looked at what are known as obligations, or the specific contracts that lock in precise payments—a more concrete way to measure the revenue a company can bank on.

Measuring those payments, Blue Origin’s average annual contracts under Trump grew 177% from the annual average under Biden.

SpaceX’s annual average under Trump grew 13% compared with the Biden years. The annual average fell for another Blue Origin competitor, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing known as the United Launch Alliance, or ULA.

Blue Origin’s overall obligations under Trump’s current administration have reached $1.1 billion, compared with nearly $1.2 billion during the entire four-year Biden administration.

Still, SpaceX has won much more in total so far under Trump—$4.6 billion—and has a substantial lead in total obligations since 2008.

Blue Origin is also far behind SpaceX in actual launches—11 flights last year, predominantly tourism flights that didn’t reach orbit, compared with SpaceX’s 161 flights that mostly delivered satellites to space.

The Pentagon at the time said there were no external influences on the decision.

Early in 2017, Bezos met with some of the Post’s top political reporters at the newspaper’s headquarters. When a reporter asked Bezos about Trump’s threats to hurt his businesses, Bezos told the journalists not to worry about it. “I’m a big boy, I can take care of myself,” Bezos said, according to Baron, the former Post editor.

In 2018, Bezos faulted NBC’s news programming for being what he viewed as weak on Trump. At an Oscars party that year, he approached NBC’s then-chairman Andrew Lack and said to him: “When are you guys going to stand up to Trump?” according to Lack. He asked what Bezos was referring to and the billionaire responded: “Come on, you’re letting him off the hook!”

A spokesman for Bezos said that Bezos denied this interaction with Lack and that the last time Bezos watched NBC, Tom Brokaw was the anchor. In response to Bezos’ denial, Lack said: “I think that was the last time he read the Washington Post, too.”

At the time, Bezos told others in private that he knew Trump’s attacks were costing him money. He would ask advisers how to respond to Trump’s taunts online and generally decided to avoid them entirely. He expressed displeasure with Trump’s governing style.

After Trump lost in 2020, Bezos was rarely spotted at Washington functions. He grew frustrated with the Biden administration, which, as many other tech CEOs did, he viewed as antibusiness.

Bezos was largely shunned by the Biden White House—one clash was Bezos’ antiunion stance, which conflicted with the Biden agenda, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Bezos called that “nonsense” adding that “Biden stiff-armed the entire Fortune 100, rarely engaging with business leaders.”

Bezos wasn’t invited to roundtables and other White House events. Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, had penned a viral law review article as a student that argued Amazon was a monopoly.

A spokesman for Bezos declined to comment on how Bezos identifies politically. He was one of the major funders of Barack Obama’s presidential center, according to a person familiar with the matter, cutting a $100 million check. “I’m on the side of America,” Bezos said in his May CNBC interview, adding that he has worked with every president going back to Bill Clinton.

Last year, he married Lauren Sánchez, a former television news anchor who as of 2023 was registered as a Democrat in California. Before their affair became public in January 2019, Bezos had a conversation with Sánchez and her brother, which was recorded, where they discussed the potential that the media would reveal it.

Referring to David Pecker, the then-publisher of the National Enquirer, Bezos said: “He probably hates me. He probably thinks I’m a left coast liberal, and I’m not,” according to a recording reviewed by the Journal. Pecker has been a close Trump ally.

Bezos told a friend he didn’t think Trump was coming back after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, and that the country was moving on. But after Trump was shot in a 2024 assassination attempt, Bezos called him to tell him he was a “badass” and told others Trump would likely win.

That fall, the Post decided not to endorse a presidential candidate and scuttled the piece backing Harris. Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos, one of the people said.

Bezos and Sánchez have struck up a friendship with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Bezos and Sánchez have dined with the president and the first lady at Mar-a-Lago, and they attended the inauguration alongside other prominent technology CEOs.

“I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” Bezos said in the CNBC interview.

His seeming closeness with the president has caused problems at the Post. During a meeting with some Post editors and reporters at his home in March, Bezos explained his relationship with Trump and talked also about his ties with President Obama, according to people familiar with the meeting. He said he had worked well with every president but Biden.

Bezos also said he didn’t regret blocking the presidential endorsement at the Post and would do it again, but should have announced his decision sooner and communicated better, the people said. He said he had rejected multiple offers to sell the paper.

When Trump had dinner with Rupert Murdoch earlier this year, he asked the founder of News Corp if Bezos could actually save the Post, a person at the dinner said. News Corp is the owner of the Journal. A News Corp spokesman declined to comment.

He also asked Murdoch if he would be interested in buying it, and Murdoch said he wasn’t, the attendee said. Bezos was a friend, but he was having a difficult time managing the Post, Trump said.

Write to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Shane Shifflett at shane.shifflett@dowjones.com