GREAT MOMENTS IN DUE DILIGENCE: Jeff Bezos told Trump the Washington Post was his worst investment before slashing staff: ‘People there are terrible.’
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called the Washington Post his worst investment in a conversation with President Trump months before gutting the newsroom, according to a new book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.
“The people there are terrible,” Bezos told Trump over dinner in December 2024, according to an excerpt obtained by The Post ahead of the June 23 release of “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.“
“They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” Bezos said, focusing his ire at the business side of the publication after losing more than $100 million that year.
About two months after the dinner, Bezos ordered the Washington Post’s opinion pages to promote “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” — as subscribers peeled off in protest of the paper withholding its endorsement from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Bezos this February authorized the sweeping downsizing of the celebrated Watergate paper, eliminating roughly a third of its workforce, including all staff photographers and the sports section.
Bezos’ candor with Trump was described by Swan and Haberman as part of a larger effort by Big Tech titans to cozy up with the incoming president, who had spent his four years in political exile railing against what he viewed as bias by news outlets and major internet platforms.
Trump told Bezos “this Washington Post is really unfair. You’ve got to take better care,” the book says.
“Bezos commiserated with Trump over their December dinner, indicating that he, too, was deeply frustrated with the Post, though for a different reason.”
“In Trump’s telling, Bezos told him he had lost half his friends over the investment,” the authors write. “Bezos would tell others that wasn’t quite right: He hadn’t lost friends, but people close to him had urged him to sell the newspaper.”
The brand names will likely continue, but we’re witnessing numerous mass media-era stalwarts in their dotage: the Post, late night talk shows, and Hollywood, all being devoured or radically transformed by changes in how we consume opinion and entertainment. The New York Times survives via its various non-news offshoots: “News remains the institution’s center of gravity, but Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic have given its advertising team a broader set of commercial entry points. Some are built around habit, others around purchase intent, fandom or utility. Crucially, many feel less intimidating to marketers that might otherwise hesitate at the idea of advertising with a news brand.”
In contrast, Bezos’ Amazon is what is keeping the lights on at the WaPo, and the staff at the paper believed they should essentially be considered tenured academics with Bezos having no say in how his investment is operated. As we’ve seen in recent years, the WaPo’s entitled leftist journalists have had numerous Scott Pelley-style flameouts before being shown the door.
