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A Musk associate, fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman, has been nominated to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is widely expected to reorient the agency’s mission from the Moon to Mars — a SpaceX priority. The Trump administration’s proposed budget would cut NASA funding by 24 per cent and potentially kill a moon mission Blue Origin is building a lander for. SpaceX is also looking to influence the regulator governing Inc.’s Project Kuiper satellite internet service, which will compete with Musk’s Starlink. 

“Elon has both feet inside the door and is calling the shots,” says Bill Goodman, the chief executive officer of Goodman Technologies, a materials company that has worked with NASA and a range of aerospace companies. “How do you compete with that?”

For years, lobbyists working for Amazon and Blue Origin managed to influence policy and government contracts, according to someone who worked closely with Bezos. Now, this person says, he risks being the odd man out. So, after tangling on and off with the president for a decade, Bezos has made moves widely interpreted as efforts to reboot his relationship with Trump.

Shortly before the election, Bezos’ Washington Post yanked its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. After Trump won, Amazon said it had licensed a documentary about his wife, Melania, at a cost of $40 million. It also began streaming reruns of The Apprentice, the reality show credited with selling the president to the masses as a business genius. Joining its Big Tech peers, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, where Bezos mingled with the chiefs of Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. 

Since then, Bezos has adopted a lower profile even as tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg have continued to visit the White House and lobby Trump directly. This is very much in keeping with Bezos’ nature, according to more than 20 current and former associates interviewed by Bloomberg. Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters, they portray a pragmatic businessman seeking to shield his companies from the risks posed by an unpredictable administration without getting bogged down in the daily scrum.

One confidant says anyone who believes Bezos is “kowtowing to the political winds dramatically underestimates how long-term oriented he is.” Other associates are betting Musk’s disagreements with the administration over trade and immigration will eventually break up the Trump-Musk bromance. “Why beg for Trump to love you more than Elon?” says the person who previously worked with Bezos. “Better to just sit back and wait for the divorce.”

A representative for Bezos declined to make him available for this story.  Blue Origin and Amazon declined to comment. SpaceX, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Musk doubles down

As recently as last spring, Bezos was doing little to ingratiate himself with Trump. In March of 2024, with the election campaign heating up, Bezos gave $50 million to retired Navy admiral Bill McRaven as part of an annual Courage and Civility Award Bezos established in 2021. McRaven has been calling Trump a threat to the American republic for years. An additional $50 million went to actress Eva Longoria, an immigration activist and Democratic fundraiser. 

Everything changed in July, when Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Thirty minutes later, Musk popped up on X, the social media platform he owns, to enthusiastically endorse Trump for a second term.

The same night Bezos, who rarely posts on social media, said on X that Trump had shown “tremendous grace and courage” but didn’t reveal his own presidential preference. Musk doubled down, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign. It soon became clear that Musk would wield outsize clout in a Trump 2 White House. 

Not long after the assassination attempt, Bezos arranged a call with Trump to recommend Doug Burgum, then governor of North Dakota, as a vice-presidential candidate, according to Axios. Less than two weeks before the election, Bezos pulled the Washington Post’s planned Harris endorsement, the newspaper later reported. The timing was widely interpreted as an attempt to inoculate him and the Post from Trump’s wrath. Bezos denied any quid pro quo, but subscribers revolted and several journalists quit.

While the move shocked some Bezos associates, cannier observers saw a businessman protecting his interests. The Post still matters to Bezos, these people say, but Amazon and Blue Origin matter a whole lot more.

Bezos has been a space nerd since boyhood. In his high school valedictory speech, he spoke of building extraterrestrial human colonies. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, with a goal of lowering the cost of space exploration by creating reusable rockets. Musk had similar aspirations when he founded SpaceX about two years later. In the end, Musk got there first and began winning government contracts.

Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021 and began spending more time at Blue Origin. While remaining Amazon’s executive chairman, he’s rarely sighted at Seattle headquarters these days, according to people familiar with the situation, and prefers to keep in touch with executives by phone. Despite perceptions that Bezos spends much of his time yachting around the world and hanging out with celebrities, he devotes as much as 10 hours a day to meetings, he said during a New York Times event in December. Mostly Bezos huddles with the team at Blue Origin, where he sets corporate strategy and sometimes weighs in on engineering choices.

Bezos has sought to impose discipline on the company and build a credible rival to SpaceX,  according to people familiar with the situation. Since he began devoting more time to Blue Origin, it has launched the long-delayed New Glenn rocket to orbit and cut about 10 per cent of personnel in an effort to minimize bureaucracy and focus on ramping up manufacturing and launches.

Blue Origin’s halting progress has been catnip for Musk, who has trolled Bezos with “copy cat” barbs and second-place emojis. While Bezos has steered clear of sophomoric social media jabs, Blue Origin has filed at least two protests seeking to overturn federal contracts with SpaceX. In 2013, Blue Origin challenged NASA’s move to lease out a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX continues to use it. Blue Origin unsuccessfully sued the government in 2021 after NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9-billion contract to deliver astronauts to the Moon.

Playing catchup

Blue Origin has a lot of catching up to do. In the last 11 years, SpaceX has won as much as $25 billion in U.S. government contracts to Blue Origin’s roughly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg tally of awards. SpaceX rockets have become workhorses for NASA, routinely ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station, while Blue Origin has mostly sent tourists aloft. In a jaunt marketed as the first all-female space flight in decades, but widely dismissed as a publicity stunt, the company recently blasted Bezos fiancée Lauren Sánchez, TV anchorwoman Gayle King, pop star Katy Perry and three other women on a roughly 10-minute ride.

Blue Origin is determined to demonstrate its bona fides with the Artemis program, NASA’s planned mission to return people to the Moon, and has won a $3.4-billion contract to build a lunar lander. But Musk has long seen Mars as a worthier goal and has routinely showed up at Trump events wearing an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt. Now, he’s pushing NASA to put the focus back on the red planet, a mission that SpaceX’s colossal Starship launch system is being developed for.

Isaacman, Trump’s pick to run the agency, has a close relationship with SpaceX, investing in the company to create a human space flight program called Polaris and performing the world’s first commercial spacewalk. During his confirmation hearing, senators grilled Isaacman about his perceived conflict. Responding to a question from Michigan Democrat Gary Peters, Isaacman said he hadn’t been in contact with Musk about his plans to manage the agency.

“Senator, I absolutely want to be clear, my loyalty is to this nation, the space agency, and their world-changing mission,” he said. Isaacman also pledged not to abandon the agency’s multibillion-dollar Moon push and send astronauts to Mars instead. 

Besides cutting NASA funding, the administration’s proposed budget would add $1 billion for Mars — without saying exactly how the money would be spent. The first crewed moon landing would proceed, with SpaceX providing the vehicle. But the second and third are on the chopping block, putting Blue Origin’s lander contract in doubt.  

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is also vulnerable. The $10-billion initiative is one of the company’s biggest bets and would transform it into a broadband internet provider. While Amazon successfully launched an initial batch of 27 satellites last week, the government has required Kuiper to have more than 1,600 in orbit by the end of July 2026.

But Amazon is struggling to build them quickly enough to meet the deadline, Bloomberg reported last month. As a result, the company will probably have to seek an extension from the Federal Communications Commission, according to people familiar with the situation.

In March, the FCC solicited comment on what regulations it should change or strike from the books. Among other ideas, SpaceX suggested that the agency stop granting extensions for satellite operators except in “rare and truly unforeseeable circumstances that warrant a very brief extension.”

Last week, Bezos was reminded of how easily his relationship with the Trump administration could be upended. The president had caught wind of a report that Amazon was planning to display the cost of U.S. tariffs in its online store. The White House press secretary railed against the company, calling the purported move “a hostile and political act.” Trump even called Bezos to complain.

Amazon released a statement saying that the idea had been proposed for a tiny part of its site that lets shoppers buy products directly from Chinese companies. A spokesperson later added that the proposal “was never approved and is not going to happen.”

The dustup died down as quickly as it had erupted and had zero connection to Blue Origin or Project Kuiper. But it made clear that Bezos will  have to carefully tend his relationship with Trump.

Goodman, the materials company chief, recommends that he look for opportunities — including supply chains and manufacturing — where Blue Origin can work with SpaceX and show Trump and Musk that his main goal is to help advance space exploration.

“From a business strategy perspective Mr. Bezos should take on missions that are complementary to Mr. Musk’s, not competitive to them,” he says. “It’s space for God’s sake, so there are so many opportunities to work tangentially to Elon. Or even synergistically.”

—With assistance from Sana Pashankar, Loren Grush, Kelcee Griffis, Aisha Counts and Stephanie Lai

Bloomberg