“The Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die,” Bezos said to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Though THR says he defended the film’s box office performance, he continued, “I had nothing to do with that. By the way, it appears it was a good business decision. You know, it did very well in theaters. It’s done very well on streaming. People are very curious about Melania. So even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision.” Bezos also had “nothing to do with Project Hail Mary,” though he wishes he had because it made his company money.
Of course, the fact that his company produced these things would suggest that Bezos had something to do with them, or could have at least stopped either of them from happening had he really wanted to. For example, in the same interview, he discusses the massive layoffs at The Washington Post earlier this year. “I didn’t pick who was going to get laid off or which departments,” he said, except when he did. “I said, follow the data, follow the data. And I said, there’s one exception to this … Don’t follow the data on investigative reporting. The heart of the Post is investigative reporting.” He also did seemingly take credit for the change to the Post‘s opinion section that coincided with a great loss of subscribers: “I want the Post’s opinion section to stand for free markets, kind of what I’ve been talking to you about today, free markets and individual personal liberties. I think… those are founding pillars of America. It’s one of the reasons that America has been so successful.”
Whether or not they make the Post more successful remains to be seen. But regarding Melania and the changes to the Post, Bezos says, “Amazon’s a big company and makes a lot of decisions. But no, this idea that, you know, that somehow that is a way of buying influence, it’s just not. It’s just not correct.” Still, “I can see why people say this.”
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