Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos pushed back on Wednesday against the persistent claim that he personally orchestrated the company’s acquisition of the Melania Trump documentary, calling the narrative a “falsehood that will not die” during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021 and currently serves as executive chairman, told host Andrew Ross Sorkin that he had no involvement in the decision to acquire the film and that he continued to see it cited incorrectly as his initiative.
Amazon MGM Studios paid approximately $40 million to license the documentary, directed by Brett Ratner, with total spending including marketing estimated by some outlets to have reached $75 million.
The film follows 20 days in First Lady Melania Trump’s life in the run-up to her husband’s January 2025 presidential inauguration, offering what the studio described as unprecedented access to private conversations, critical meetings, and the behind-the-scenes logistics of a White House transition.
Melania was released in theaters on 30 January 2026 and earned $16.6 million at the global box office, a result that fell short of the acquisition cost but was followed by what Bezos described as strong streaming performance on Amazon Prime.
In the CNBC interview, Bezos called the acquisition “a very wise business decision,” adding that the streaming numbers justified the investment even if the theatrical performance was modest.
He denied that the project was a vehicle for currying political favour, and stated that both he and Melania Trump’s office had formally rejected that characterisation.
The controversy around the film intensified in March when a group of Democratic lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representatives Hank Johnson, Dan Goldman, and Ben Ray Luján sent a letter to Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy questioning the extraordinary price paid for the documentary and raising concerns about whether the deal constituted a form of political arrangement.
Warren went further in public remarks, describing the acquisition as “bribery in plain sight,” language that Bezos did not engage with directly in the CNBC interview but implicitly rejected with his insistence that the decision was purely commercial.
An Amazon MGM spokesperson previously stated that the acquisition followed a thorough and competitive bidding process and that the decision was based entirely on the film’s cultural and historical relevance and the quality of access it provided.
Bezos also offered a favourable assessment of President Trump’s second term during the same interview, describing him as “a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.”
The combination of the documentary acquisition, Bezos’s attendance at Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, and the suppression of a Washington Post presidential endorsement during the 2024 campaign have collectively shaped a narrative that Bezos is seeking to maintain cordial relations with the administration, a characterisation he has consistently disputed.
