Kent-based Blue Origin became part of a pulled presidential endorsement controversy the past several days involving owner Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post newspaper, also owned by Bezos.
The Post announced Oct. 25 it would not endorse a presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election after its editorial board had already drafted its endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris over Republican Donald Trump, according to several media reports.
Within hours of that announcement, Blue Origin’s David Limp, chief executive officer, and Megan Mitchell, vice-president of government relations, briefly met with Trump after an Austin, Texas campaign speech, according to the Associated Press.
Blue Origin, which has a launch facility in West Texas, is an aerospace company founded in 2000 in Kent by Bezos that has a couple of federal contracts with NASA and is seeking more. One of its chief rivals is SpaceX, which also has NASA contracts, and is owned by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and owner of X, formerly Twitter, who has strongly endorsed Trump and contributed at least $136 million to his campaign, according to fortune.com.
Blue Origin and SpaceX are competitors in flying astronauts to space, the moon and eventually Mars as well as flying commercial customers.
“Some critics suggested Bezos ordered the non-endorsement to protect his business interests, acting out of fear of retaliation if Donald Trump were elected,” according to an Oct. 29 CBS News report. “The Post endorsed Trump’s Democratic rivals in 2016 and 2020, and Trump has often denounced critical coverage by the paper.”
Bezos, who also owns Amazon, acknowledged that the chief executive of one of his companies, the space-exploration outfit Blue Origin, met with Trump last week on the same day the non-endorsement was announced, according to CBS.
“I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision,” Bezos wrote in a note from the owner published Oct. 28 in the Post. “But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand.”
Two of the Post’s columnists quit, and three of the nine members of the editorial board resigned after the decision to not make an endorsement. Since the no endorsement decision, more than 200,000 people have canceled their subscriptions to the newspaper, according to NPR.
Robert Kagan, Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist, resigned Oct. 25. He argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice president as it planned, according to CBS News.
“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told the Daily Beast on Oct. 26. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”
Bezos, in his published note, pushed back that there was no endorsement to protect his business interests.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
Bezos admitted the timing was poor.
“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” he wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
He said the meeting with Blue Origin leaders with Trump wasn’t planned.
“The fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand,” Bezos said. “Even (CEO) Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
Blue Origin’s federal contracts include:
• 2023: NASA selected the company for a $3.4 billion contract to develop a human landing system for the agency’s Artemis V mission to the Moon.
• 2023: NASA awarded a $35 million partnership to Blue Origin to turn the dust and crushed rock on the Moon surface into solar-power systems.
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