Someone pointed me to this post from former Washington Post columnist Philip Bump:
The link to Bump’s longer post is here. I’m not questioning Moynihan’s or Bump’s numbers–I haven’t checked them myself, but I have no reason to believe that they’re wrong–but I think they’re both kinda missing the point regarding Bezos’s motivations.
Here’s my story (which, as noted in the above title, is entirely speculation):
Jeff Bezos is a rich guy with money to spare. He can afford to buy a major newspaper if it is for sale, or to start his own newspaper if he wants to do so. He could’ve done this in Seattle, for example. But that’s not just true of Bezos, it’s true of many other rich people, and most of them are not buying or starting up news organizations. There are reasons for this: first, running a newspaper costs money, and even if you’re rich, you don’t want to throw money away. Second, fewer and fewer people read newspapers or even watch TV news. If you buy or start a newspaper, you’re not getting in on the ground floor; it’s more like you’re stepping into an elevator that’s in free fall. The dream in tech is to find the next big thing with unlimited potential, not to invest in a mature and declining industry.
Why, then, did Bezos buy the Washington Post in the first place? Well, it is a unique property with influence and a storied history, so maybe it’s just that it became available and he grabbed it. He might have had some vague goal of supporting journalism, also owning a newspaper provides some protection against biased reporting. Even if Bezos is owning the newspaper in a hands-off way, and its reporters are willing to report bad news against him, presumably they’ll give him a fair shake and not be actively biased against him. Later he was hassled by the National Enquirer, so it’s not like this sort of thing couldn’t happen. If you think the media might do you harm, it can be good to have your own media outlet. So, some mix of public spiritedness, the idea of being a leading citizen, also with possible defensive value. And, who knows, maybe the possibility of a business success.
There’s a logic to it. Supposing you can afford the initial outlay and the ongoing cost, if you buy or start a newspaper, staff it with serious journalists and editors, and let them do their thing, you’ll have bought yourself some good press and some protection against biased reporting and political intimidation, you can feel you’re making some contribution to civil society, and it’s a toy to play with; nothing wrong with that!
But then what happened between 2013 and 2026? My guess is that it all just became too much hassle. Instead of being a source of good press, owning the Washington Post became a public relations hassle. When it reports stories or run op-eds that make Republicans look bad, Bezos gets attacked from the right. When he tells his staff to go easy on Republicans, he gets attacked from the left. Dude’s getting slammed from both sides. If he lets the Post continue to be run by its editors, he gets no credit from the center or left but he has to deal with an ongoing stream of annoyance from the right. But when he decides to solve that problem by bringing in a compliant outside editorial team, he’s suddenly the man who killed the news.
Meanwhile, it’s not clear what benefit Bezos is getting from owning the newspaper. In theory he could use his ownership of the Post as a political tool, for example telling Trump that if the government doesn’t give Amazon some juicy contract, he’ll start filling up the front pages with Jeffrey Epstein stories. But in practice it doesn’t seem that this is the sort of hardball that Bezos likes to play. Avoiding sales tax is one thing, lobbying is fine, but maybe outright threats would be an escalation too far.
So, instead of being fun, good publicity, and a sort of political insurance, owning the Post has become the opposite: it’s a pain in the ass, invites attacks form all sides, and entangles him in politics more than ever. Also it keeps draining money.
So, from that perspective, it makes sense for Bezos to wash his hands of the whole thing. The point is not the cost of running the newspaper as compared to his unimaginable wealth is irrelevant.
At this point you might wonder why Bezos doesn’t sell what remains of the newspaper or just shut it down. It could be a business decision on his part, or maybe an assessment that it could be useful to have the Washington Post around if you’re in some fight involving public opinion.
And, again Bezos isn’t the only zillionaire out there who can afford to buy a big-city newspaper. The fact that zillionaires (whether politically-minded or just motivated to protect their business interests) are not queuing to buy newspapers or set up their own alternatives suggests that they don’t see much value in media properties. There’s also something about the nature of the business: buy a news or organizations and it comes with all these reporters who want to report the news without political interference, then you have to suck it up and get bitten by the people you’re feeding, or you have to fire a bunch of people and replace them with compliant substitutes. Maybe this will be less of an issue going forward as the supply of conservative journalists increases.
P.S. Sam in comments offers another plausible explanation, which is that Bezos saw this as a business opportunity and thought that he’d be able to turn the Washington Post into a profitable newspaper.
I doubt this is correct. My guess: Bezos naively or stupidly thought he could use the brand of the Washington Post to turn the newspaper profitable. Consider, Bezos bought the Post in 2013 for about $250 million. That year, it had an operating loss of about $50 million. Last year, it had an operating loss of about $100 million.
Also, Bezos bought the Washington Post — not the Washington Post Company. The company’s primary profit, in 2013, came from Kaplan, the test prep company. Almost all of the profit, in 2013, was from the test prep company. In 2013, also, the Washington Post Company had a public valuation of about $4 billion. The company, also, had extensive real estate holdings in DC and Virginia. At the time, a large part of 15th St., in downtown DC, was owned by the Washington Post Company — none of which Bezos bought.
So, I think that Bezos thought he was getting a steal at buying the Post for ONLY $250 million. He most likely thought that there must be ways that he, the founder of one of the largest companies in the world, can monetize the newspaper that then current owners couldn’t. So, he spent the past 13 years coming up with ways of how to monetize the continually profit-losing newspaper.
His last gasp, in my opinion, was trying to turn the newspaper into something ideologically different, in order to broaden the base of its readers. When that didn’t work, this is when he started laying off Washington Post employees.
So, the reality of the newspaper business seems to be that selling the news can’t be profitable. There are exceptions, such as the NY Times, but I think they’re the exception because they realize that games, such as Wordle, are more valuable to the company than the news. Maybe, if Bezos were a better businessperson, he would have realized this in 2013, when he bought the newspaper.
Probably a cheap shot but you missed the part where Bezos set his marriage on fire. He ostensibly lost any inclination to virtue signal. All this happened during Trump cronyism was on the rise as you had pointed out.
With regard to an extremely rich person buying something like “The Washington Post”, I suggest the word “vanity” ought to be part of the mix. Lots of people (so I am told) have ungodly amounts of money, but few of them own a prestigious newspaper or other media outlet. Ego in this instance might triumph over economics. In short, it might not make economic sense to own a newspaper, but psychologically it might be rewarding.
One of the enduring observations about the ultra-rich, going back at least to the 19th c., is that having gobs of money makes you more aware of what you don’t have. This is often about prestige. It’s why rich people bought their way into the nobility, cavorted with cultural luminaries by collecting art, mega-donating to opera or universities, etc. My suspicion is that the WaPo was one of the last remaining media outlets that had class and clout, and Bezos thought he would bring some of this on himself by purchasing it. If he could even save it from the great plague that is annihilating newspapers left and right, so much the better. MacKenzie probably liked this move.
But then the culture of the tech billionaires shifted. Rather than seeing themselves as an offshoot of science, culture and education more generally, it gravitated to cultish Ayn Rand-type attachments. Again, this wasn’t just about making more money, although the eagerness of the far right to cultivate and enlist the scarier aspects of tech, like mass surveillance, certainly helped. The point here is that WaPo’s step by step transformation into a MAGA-ish outlet has given Bezos standing among his peers. He’s not just a guy who became very rich by building up a virtual store into a monopoly money-making machine; he’s on the front lines in transforming the culture into the direction his crowd believes it needs to go in. As we know, MacKenzie was not pleased.
FWIW, intellectually, Bezos strikes me as much more a follower than a leader. If the ethos of tech/money world shifts to something else, I expect him to shift with it.
+1
Before switching to “Amazon,” Bezos initially wanted to call his company “Cadabra,” meaning “I create as I speak.”
To me this indicates that Bezos always saw himself as some sort of modern re-incarnation of William Randolph Hearst, but after years of being surrounded by fawning toadies, he began to believe the platitudes, lost any interest he had in populism, and went full Ayn Rand, as Peter suggests.
Third theory would be that Jeff’s put vaguely competent people in charge, and that the Washington Post was ludicrously overstaffed, as every US newspaper is. These jobs should not exist, and as the jobs are in journalism, those being fired are good at talking about how unfair it all is. Stolen from Tim Worstall, here: https://timworstall.substack.com/p/of-course-jeff-bezos-should-fire.
Nick:
What do you mean, “These jobs should not exist”? From an economic standpoint, what does it mean that a job “should exist”? The job should exist if someone will pay for it, no? So that’s just circular reasoning: the job “should exist” until the boss eliminates it, and then it “shouldn’t”?
Here’s an example. I don’t have a butler. The job of “Andrew’s butler” should not exist. If someone’s somehow drawing a salary with that title, it’s a mistake. On the other hand, if I decide to spend my hard-earned cash on a personal servant, then the job should exist, right?
If only the world were so simple. You are suggesting equating “jobs that should exist” with “jobs that people are willing to pay for” and “jobs that should not exist” with “jobs people are not willing to pay for.” That seems quite straightforward and almost tautological, until you consider the various ways that labor markets are not perfect. People are willing to pay people to do illegal and unethical things and there are many desirable things that people could do but nobody will pay them to do. If you need a concrete example, I’d say there should be people paid to do high quality unbiased peer review, but few such jobs exist (at least too few). Journalists should be paid to do high quality investigative journalism, but again, too few are paid to do so. More people should be paid to clean up after their dogs or paid to not require such cleanup.
The problem is the word “should.” It is inescapable that this brings ethics into the discussion. What jobs people are willing to pay people to do is only loosely connected to what we believe people “should” do. I think Nick’s comment about overstaffing is based on his ethical beliefs about journalism and your response reflects your different ethical beliefs. There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed, we should expect many different ethical views. But I don’t think it is wise to let the market be the ultimate judge of ethical differences.
Dale:
I agree with you. In my above comment I was pushing against Nick’s statement that “These jobs should not exist.”
“WASHINGTON —All of a sudden, there are a lot of empty desks at the Washington Post. Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, reported to be the fourth-richest person in the world, fired a third of the newsroom staff.
The sports section is gone. The Style section, known for its bright and sometimes edgy writing, is gone. Book World, a longtime mainstay, is gone. The Metro section covering Washington D.C.—never a strong point at the paper—may be going. Nobody’s covering the Winter Olympics.
And the entire Middle East staff, including the Cairo-based editor, covering Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza and Gazans, is gone. So is the staff covering the Russia-Ukraine War, and a host of other developments around the world.”
Yeah, maybe these journalists weren’tr doing anything useful and needed to be fired. Seriously, who expects a newspaper nowadays to cover the Middle East or Russia, nothing ever happens in these parts of hte world and why don’t we just let some LLM chatbot write thinkpieces about how Trump is the greatest military commander of all time, that’s what readers really expect from a newspaper! Sheesh can’t make this stuff up.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/jeff-bezos-fires-at-least-a-third-of-staff-at-washington-post/
One experienced reporter fired already last year was Karen Attiah who won an award for her “writing on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi”. Nobody wants to read stories about Saudi rulers murdering journalists, what readers really want are op-eds written by chatbots about how Trump is the greatest peace-maker of all time. That’s how you recognize journalistic quality!
https://karenattiah.substack.com/p/the-washington-post-fired-me-but
Andrew: “My guess is that it all just became too much hassle. Instead of being a source of good press, owning the Washington Post became a public relations hassle.”
The problem with this take is that WaPo only became a “public relations hassle” when Bezos started turning it into a Trumpist propaganda channel, publicly intervened in editorial decisions, hired an editor of ill repute to act as his surrogate, had a cartoon spiked that criticized his subservience to Trump, and had a number of excellent, award-winning journalists fired. Only when he
I’ll never get why so many very clever people have this tendency to explain the malevolent behavior of fascistic oligarchs without admitting that yes, they are malevolent fascists and they act exactly the way you’d expect from a malevolent fascist.
Andrew: “The fact that zillionaires (whether politically-minded or just motivated to protect their business interests) are not queuing to buy newspapers or set up their own alternatives suggests that they don’t see much value in media properties.”
The vast majority of mass media outlets, not just in the US but equally in Europe and probably elsewhere, *are actually owned by hyper-rich oligarchs*. There’s Murdoch, Springer in Germany, Bolloré in France, and these are just the best known. In the US, a pharma mogul owns the LA Times and, like Bezos with WaPo, has turned it into a Trumpist direction. There’s also Sinclair Broadcast Group owning most local TV stations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group), and … oops who owns CBS and CNN these days? And then there are the Social media platforms almost exclusively owned … by right wing billionaires. Who are we kidding??
Piglet:
My argument is that the Post became a public relations hassle before Bezos started interfering with its editorial decisions, because he was put in a position where, if he didn’t interfere, he would’ve been hassled from the right: “Hey, Jeff, your newspaper just endorsed Kamala Harris for president. What do you think of that?” The hassle is that it was not possible to just let the newspaper run on its own; in the current political climate, not interfering with the newspaper’s operation was itself a decision.
“My argument is that the Post became a public relations hassle before Bezos started interfering with its editorial decisions”
What’s your evidence for this claim? I’m not aware of any.
“if he didn’t interfere, he would’ve been hassled from the right”
The WaPo has always endorsed candidates, it did so in 2016 and 2020, already under Bezos’ ownership. If it had done in 2024 what it had always done, why would that create a “hassle” for the owner? Has the political climate really changed significantly since 2016? Not according to election results.
What actually has changed is that the oligarch class (including Bezos of course) has moved very strongly to the radical right (there is evidence for this in data about large campaign donations). So if you mean to say that Bezos in 2024 was under pressure from his billionaire friends to change WaPo’s politics, you might be right about that, but that’s not what you wrote. From the PR point of view, it was his decision to dictate the editorial line that caused a lot of negative publicity and ultimately cost the paper hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A price – both reputational and financial – he was obviously willing to pay because his priority was ideological.
Your argument assumes a Bezos continuum but we now know that Bezos became obsessed with ageing and immortality some time after the Post purchase and in this new reincarnation a lot of the “nice” and “civic” behaviours were replaced by selfishness and hedonism. So the purchase of the Post was by the old Bezos, its destruction by the new one.
A:
That’s interesting. I’d think of hedonism and a quest for immortality as being opposites. Hedonism is all about the idea that your days are numbered so have fun while they last. Immortality is all about concern for the future. To use econ jargon, they represent opposite extremes of time discounting.
I wonder if he bought it for the content to feed into Amazon’s LLMs.
I don’t think the timing works for that.
Bezos did buy it at a time that he needed content for the Amazon Kindle. That could have been the main purpose.
Honestly it’s not that different from buying a sports team and in fact I think there are tons of analogies that could flow from that premise.
Of recent relevance is the Schumpeter column in this week’s Economist (April 11), “The chatter-industrial complex.” It does mention CEO and media ownership, but also CEO and media exposure. One particular summary comment in the column: “But if the purpose of tech bosses becoming talking heads was to persuade the public that they are in good hands, the opposite has sometimes happened.”