Pundits have been saying Trump’s animus toward the Washington Post is behind his recent attacks against Amazon. Turns out he’s been quietly meeting with Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle. Oracle and Amazon are in a competition to win a multi-billion dollar Pentagon contract to build a secure cloud system. One wonders what rewards Catz may have promised Trump personally in turn for that contract going to Oracle.
Amazon has already done work for the CIA and has been perceived as frontrunner for the Pentagon contract:
President Donald Trump apparently dined with Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz on Tuesday night amid his repeated berating of Amazon, a company with which Oracle is in direct competition to land a Pentagon contract worth billions.
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday evening that Trump would dine with Catz and the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider about what was discussed at the meeting.
The meeting came amid Trump's war of words with Amazon. On Tuesday, he tweeted that he was "right" about his criticism of the internet giant's use of the US Postal Service, later telling reportersthat Amazon was causing numerous store closures.
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Amazon's status as the perceived frontrunner for the contract has been largely cemented by its $600 million deal with the CIA in 2013, showing that the company can manage and secure sensitive information, and providing it a leg up on obtaining top-level security credentials.
Draft requirements released by the Pentagon for the project — called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud initiative, or JEDI — say that bidders must be able to obtain those security credentials within nine months of winning the contract. As of now, Amazon Web Services is the only potential vendor that meets that requirement.
Additionally, the Pentagon recently agreed to a deal worth up to $65 million with a company that partners with Amazon Web Services to provide cloud services to the US Transportation Command.
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