Bezos: Disinformation board should investigate Biden tweet

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos criticized President Biden for a tweet the president wrote suggesting that taxing wealthier corporations could help bring down inflation, calling lumping the two topics together a “misdirection.”

“You want to bring down inflation? Let’s make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,” Biden tweeted on Friday evening.

“The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead. Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection,” Bezos shot back, quote-tweeting Biden’s statement on the platform.

Since the announcement of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board last month, the new board has drawn the ire from a number of Republicans who have called it the “Ministry of Truth” and alleged it would censor free speech. 

Bezos’s remarks come as inflation in the United States reached a 40-year high amid labor shortages and supply chain issues, the latest of which has plagued the baby formula industry.

Amazon has also repeatedly come under criticism from Democrats for not paying more in taxes. Biden previously criticized the company in March of last year, saying it and other companies had paid zero in income taxes.

CNBC reported that Amazon paid $162 million in federal taxes in 2019 but previously had not owed taxes to the federal government since 2016.

Amazon’s bill jumped to $1.8 billion in federal taxes in 2020, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, a figure that would likely grow higher under a Biden plan to set a minimum tax rate for corporations.