Donald Trump does not like Jeff Bezos. The creator of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post has had to endure the last heater of the president of the USA on Twitter.
For Trump Amazon is evil
Trump has accused Jeff Bezos that Amazon benefits from billions of dollars in subsidies from the US postal system, but at the same time evades taxes as much as he can. This was made clear in a tweet on March 29:
That message was followed by another one on April 2 in which he again attacked Amazon and highlights how the owners of stores in the United States pay their taxes and they do not, something that is not fair for them:
Those messages caused a 5% drop in the value of Amazon shares that day, but Trump does not seem to have any intention of stopping, and according to sources close to the president, "is out of step with this, it's war."
One of the objectives of these complaints was to make the Post Office, the US postal service, charge more to Amazon. Trump relied on a now famous report by CitiGroup in which it was stated that the true cost of this operation was 50% more than what it was charging to Amazon, but as analysts have pointed out, they used an adjusted model for that conclusion. Gary Cohn, former COO of Goldman Sachs and adviser to the president, explained that Amazon benefits from lower tariffs because in turn it has managed to increase the volume of shipments after the drop of service in the era of e-mail.
To that same conclusion came other analyzes such as the one published by CBSNews, and according to which the postal service had given losses for a decade was not the fault of Amazon, which in fact had clearly helped in the income by parcel courier.
In fact, the service "has lost money over the last 11 years, mainly due to health and pension costs ." In 2017, the service lost 800 million dollars with 69,700 million operating revenues, and according to a 2006 law, it must pre-finance 75 years of health benefits for retirement plans, neither government nor private companies are obligated to do so. "
Amazon certainly takes advantage of the volume discounts of the US mail service, and although it uses FedEx and UPS in this country for its shipments, it usually uses the postal service for that last section of the shipment. The company already commented on the issue in Fortune in 2017, stating that "the Postal Service's Regulatory Commission has consistently confirmed that Amazon's contracts with the USPS are profitable ."
Among other objectives, some are advising Trump to cancel potential contracts that would make the Pentagon use the cloud services provided by Amazon, and even investigate the company for anti-competitive practices .
The question is, why has Trump taken it with Amazon and with Jeff Bezos?
Newspapers and influences
The answer is simple: Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post. He bought it in August 2013 , and although those responsible for this medium say that Bezos has no power to decide on the editorial line, Trump does not seem to agree.
One of the Republican sources close to the president said that "Trump does not like The New York Times, but he respects it because it is the newspaper of his hometown, in the case of The Washington Post, he has zero respect for him." Although Bezos claims that it has nothing to do with that editorial tone in The Washington Post, "Trump does not believe him."
Trump's animosity with The Washington Post is clear, and in fact he often refers to this newspaper as the "Amazon Washington Post" or "Fake News Washington Post." The president of the United States has used Twitter to attack Amazon when he has felt attacked by The Washington Post, a newspaper that has been critical of Trump consistently.
Martin Baron, editor-in-chief of The Washington Post, had an interview with The New York Times in which he made clear that his editorial line was completely independent of Trump: "We covered the news about him in the way we think should be covered by any president." Baron also denied that Amazon had influence on the Post plant: "there is no one here who is being paid by Amazon, not a penny."
In fact, this editor of the newspaper commented how Bezos had never interfered in his editorial line: "I can not say enough emphatically how [Bezos] has never suggested a story to anyone here, has never criticized a story, has never suppressed a story "
As indicated in The New York Times, Donald Trump's headers with the media are frequent and changing. Last Monday, the president of the United States had already switched sides to attack Sinclair Broadcasting, another news agency.
What effect will this have on Amazon? Maybe not too much. As pointed out in The New Republic, a study by analyst Kat Tretina showed that in nine Trump attacks on private companies on Twitter their impact on the actions had been practically non-existent: although the actions may decrease significantly after the publication of those tweets, the The general trend of such actions is not particularly influenced by such attacks.