How much is your dignity worth? It seems Jeff Bezos cashed his in for at least $1 billion. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Bezos has not-so-subtly been sucking up to Donald Trump since the start of his second term as president—and all that sycophancy has apparently been quite lucrative for his rocket company, Blue Origin.
There are two different accountings happening in the Journal’s piece: One is an estimate of the sheer amount of money that Bezos’ companies have amassed via government contracts since Trump took office for a second time and adopted a more favorable opinion of the Amazon founder. The second is how Bezos purportedly got Trump to adopt a favorable opinion of him and his firms.
Let’s start with the first. Per WSJ, Trump’s government has had a real soft spot for Bezos’ Blue Origin, the billionaire’s aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company that competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Blue Origin’s reportedly racked up $1.1 billion in federal contracts since Trump assumed office again in 2025—nearly as much as the company managed to secure during the full four years of the Biden administration.
That includes contracts for things like $78 million from Space Force to expand the capacity of its space vehicles and $188 million from NASA to deliver payloads to the moon’s South Pole as part of the Artemis Program aimed at getting humans back to the moon. Blue Origin will likely be adding to that total in the coming years, too. Earlier this year, the Trump administration gave the company approval to compete for new contracts like the Department of Defense’s “Golden Dome” missile shield program.
As the Journal notes, Blue Origin barely did business with the Pentagon pre-Trump, so its approval is likely to be a boon, given the administration is currently pursuing the largest defense budget in the country’s history.
So how’d Bezos pull off getting the government to have a newfound interest in his company? It looks like the answer is good, old-fashioned toadyism, according to the Journal.
Some of Bezos’ shameless obsequiousness has been documented before. We knew that his other company, Amazon, contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and spent $40 million purchasing the rights to a Melania Trump documentary, which reportedly netted Trump $10.71 million from a licensing fee. We also knew that Amazon was one of the contributors to Trump’s ongoing ballroom project.
But WSJ has some new details that are less about money changing hands and more about Bezos purportedly making himself into Trump’s lap dog. The paper documented how Bezos apparently sat in the front row and laughed a bit too loudly at every part of a rambling Trump speech that he gave earlier this year to the Alfalfa Club, an invitation-only elite social group. It also noted that Trump seemingly invites Bezos to events on the regular and has hosted him for at least one private dinner. The two also reportedly text a fair amount—but we did know that, as Trump apparently likes to show off how tech execs, including Bezos, end up groveling in his inbox.
To Bezos’ credit, the strategy seems to have worked. Not only is Blue Origin rolling in government contracts, but according to the Journal, Trump’s also started telling advisors that he wants to see Bezos’ company get to the moon and to award it contracts to help it achieve that goal. Of course, no amount of government support really matters if your rockets blow up on the launch pad—but that really seems like a secondary goal behind raking in cash.
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