Amazon Looms Large

Last July, two weeks after a federal judge threw out Oracle’s lawsuit challenging the scope and criteria of the JEDI solicitation as corrupted by conflicts of interest favoring AWS, Trump waded directly into the controversy.

"Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it," the president said during a sit-down with the prime minister of the Netherlands, specifically citing Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

AWS is now suing the federal government, claiming that episode was indicative of a campaign of interference that illegally stymied a fair process for selecting a vendor for the massive military contract.

Trump is trying to pick winners and losers in federal procurements, AWS argues in its legal filings. The president requested a review of JEDI from his new Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in August, and within a few months Microsoft was selected as the JEDI recipient, surprising an industry that saw AWS as the clear front-runner.

In the suit, Amazon points to multiple incidents of Trump publicly bashing the company, all seemingly stemming from antipathy for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, a newspaper the administration perceives as unfriendly to its cause.

Whatever other ties that bind them, Ellison certainly shares Trump’s feelings for the e-commerce giant. The Oracle chairman also frequently mocks Amazon at his speaking events—his enmity sparked by AWS dominating the public cloud infrastructure market that Oracle desperately wants to penetrate.