In the days after Commanders owner Daniel Snyder made clear his interest in exploring all options when it comes to selling the team, it seemed inevitable that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would make a bid for the team. To date, he hasn’t.
So will he?
After news emerged over the weekend that Bezos didn’t submit a bid before last month’s deadline for doing so, we raised the question of whether Bezos deliberately decided not to make a bid, or whether he was being frozen out. That question wasn’t raised without some loose idea that there was potential merit to the latter proposition.
Since then, JP Finlay of NBC Sports Washington reported that Snyder would prefer not to tell to Bezos. That’s a point Peter King made very early in the process, that Snyder wouldn’t want to sell to the man who owns the Washington Post.
A.J. Perez of FrontOfficeSports.com reported earlier this week that Bank of America, which is handling the sale of the team, continues to court Bezos, regardless of whether Snyder would prefer to sell to someone else. The outside company’s financial interests point to maximizing the sale price, if its fee is based on the total amount of money that changes hands. And it’s obvious that Bezos would (or at least could) pay more than any of the other bidders.
For now, the highest bid (per Perez) is $6.3 billion. The night before the bids were due, Forbes reported that Snyder had received multiple bids “well north” of $7 billion. Which suggests that perhaps someone was spreading exaggerated information in order to goose the process.