Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to blast Trump into space
Amazon.com (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos is reaching stratospheric popularity with only his fourth tweet ever.
That's because the billionaire entrepreneur suggested sending Republican candidate Donald Trump into space, courtesy of Bezos's Blue Origin rocket program. To be clear, the offer isn't along the lines of rich guys celebrating their wealth by going where few humans have ever gone before. Nope. Bezos's comment was more along the lines of Ralph Kramden's threat, "Straight to the moon, Alice!"
Bezos tweeted he had been "finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump," and added that he would "reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket." He also created the hashtag #sendDonaldtoSpace. Just 18 hours after posting the tweet, Bezos had racked up more than 5,400 retweets and 5,400 "likes," and prompted a big bang of enthusiastic responses with the #sendDonaldtoSpace hashtag.
So why does Bezos want to push Trump out of the Earth's atmosphere? His suggestion came after Trump took to Twitter to criticize the billionaire, taking potshots at Amazon's lack of a profit and Bezos's ownership of The Washington Post.
Trump didn't seem entirely clear on the relationship between The Washington Post and Amazon, as he wrote that The Washington Post "scam" was saving Amazon's stock price. Yet Bezos owns the newspaper through his own holding company, Nash Holdings, which means there's no operational link between the publication and Amazon, and therefore no correlation with Amazon's stock price.
But that might seem as inconsequential as space debris to Trump, who is known for bashing his targets with dubious claims. Only 7 percent of Trump's claims are rated as "mostly true" by Politifact, a fact-checking website, while 40 percent are rated "false."
Bezos's suggestion may be gaining fans in part because of its timing, with Trump on Monday calling for the U.S. to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. World leaders and critics have condemned Trump's suggestion, with some calling it "ridiculous" and others saying it would prove to be unconstitutional.
It's not clear why Trump took aim at Bezos, although Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza speculated that it might have been in response to his piece proposing that Jeb Bush spend his money on advertisements geared toward stopping Trump's campaign. Or perhaps it was the broadside from Cillizza's colleague at the paper, columnist Dana Wilbank, who called Trump a "bigot and racist." The Post's editorial page also has treated Trump's campaign with as much warmth as a black hole, calling his campaign "corrosive" and representing "a fundamental threat to the country's political fabric."