Mr. Bezos is going to Washington.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post, and his wife MacKenzie have donated $10 million to With Honor, a super PAC dedicated to electing military veterans to Congress. It’s the largest political donation to date by Bezos.
With Honor is a fairly new PAC, which is currently backing 33 candidates—19 Democrats and 14 Republicans—with the goal of getting at least 20 elected. The Bezos donation makes up one-third of the group’s $30 million funding goal.
Bezos, unlike Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, hasn’t been a heavy donator to charitable causes. Instead, he says, he prefers to focus on long-term investments that “are contributing to society and civilization in their own ways.” And his political donations have been few and far between as well. Prior to this, his biggest was a $2.5 million contribution to support same-sex marriages.
Word of the Bezos donation to With Honor comes the day after Amazon’s market cap briefly topped $1 trillion, making it only the second company to do so.
Bezos might be a fairly apolitical person publicly, but he has been drawn into politics repeatedly in the past year, as President Donald Trump has made both Amazon and the Washington Post targets of Tweetstorms (and gone after Bezos personally as well). Those attacks temporarily cost Bezos billions in net worth, though he has long since regained it.