NEW YORK. The Pentagon announces the cancellation of the contract with Microsoft to develop its cloud, and Jeff Bezos becomes the richest man in history. The connection between these two facts may seem unintuitive, but it exists and is direct.
In 2019, the Ministry of Defense awarded the company founded by Bill Gates the ten billion dollar contract to build the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (Jedi), the cloud of the armed forces. Immediately afterward, Amazon filed a lawsuit, arguing that then-President Trump had interfered with the race to penalize Bezos, who he wanted to punish for the Washington Post’s aggressive coverage of his administration. Once elected, Biden ordered a review of the project, and the Pentagon ruled that if a judge accepted Amazon’s lawsuit the contract would be canceled, because the lengthy legal battle would have made the infrastructure obsolete before it was even built. This is exactly what happened, and so the Defense renounced the Jedi, saying that “in these conditions it no longer meets our needs.”
The project will be replaced by the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, to which both Microsoft and Amazon have been invited to contribute, where in the meantime the head of the cloud Jassy has become CEO in place of the founder. A Solomonic solution, which will allow the Pentagon to have a more modern structure, distributing the compensation between the two rival companies. This news prompted an immediate 4.7% rise in Amazon stock, which sent Bezos’ personal fortune to $ 211 billion, bypassing Elon Musk and turning him into the richest man ever.