To claim that we live in a tech-centric society understates its saturation.
Software, specifically machine learning and artificial intelligence, coupled with advanced manufacturing has brought technology to street corners, schools, offices, factories, and even agricultural fields. This technology, largely created in Silicon Valley, sits on your wrist, is carried in your pocket, integrated into the movies you watch and maybe even the music you listen to. And it’s certainly how that Amazon package was ordered, sorted, and delivered to your door.
It has turned its founders, executives and middle managers into royalty whose wealth and political influence reflect the Gilded Age. Seven of the 10 richest people in the world can link their wealth directly to technology. Washington Post co-founder, chairman and owner Jeff Bezos is third behind Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, according to Forbes, which tracks wealth and the people who have it. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer rounded out the list.
And at this point, the Bezos-owned Washington Post gutted its coverage of them and the entire tech industry as part of a sweeping set of layoffs affecting more than 300 people. The team, which spans technology, science, health and business, has more than halved from 80 to 33 people, according to tech reporter Drew Harwell. 14 people gathered at the technical table alone. Her office in San Francisco is a shell.
Those affected include reporters covering Amazon, artificial intelligence, internet culture and investigations. The paper also fired staff covering the media industry (who had previously reported on Bezos’ ownership of their own paper).
The Post cut its entire sports bureau and nearly destroyed its foreign reporting teams, including its Middle East division and reporters and their editors covering Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Turkey and more. It closed its Books section, decimated coverage of culture and the DC Metro area, and fired all reporters and editors covering racial and ethnic issues nationally.
Technology coverage is not more important than social, economic and geopolitical issues. But never before have the people who wield enormous influence over the world’s geopolitics and economy been so directly responsible for stopping the global flow of information about it.
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The world is focused on technology and tied to the GDP growth – or decline – of its superpowers. Tech’s most powerful executives are asking the public to turn their attention elsewhere.
The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray framed the layoffs as something of a reboot aimed at reaching readers and ultimately profitability, according to the New York Times, which included comments he made to employees.
“Today is about becoming more relevant to people’s lives in a crowded, competitive and complicated media environment,” he reportedly said during a Zoom meeting with employees.
It’s no secret that The Post has lost money and subscribers in recent years, in some cases because of policies created or supported by Bezos. For example, his directive to end presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, which advocated for a proposed article supporting Kamala Harris, reportedly led to “hundreds of thousands” of canceled NYT subscriptions. It reportedly suffered losses of $100 million in 2024, partly due to cancellations.
Website traffic has also decreased. Semafor said that by mid-2024, daily visits had fallen to around 3 million from 22.5 million in January 2021.
The Post cut its workforce from 1,000 to fewer than 800 last spring, with CEO Will Lewis reporting a $100 million loss from the previous year.
Of course, layoffs at The Post don’t exist in a vacuum. (The media industry, and not just the legacy players, has been plagued by fragmented audiences and changes in Google Search algorithms that have driven readers away from news feeds and toward their own AI-generated answers.)
However, the size, scale and placement of these battle axes deserve close inspection. Especially considering the shift in media ownership over the last 15 years.
Bezos’s $250 million acquisition of the Post in 2013 was met with a mixture of skepticism and hope from jaded journalists who had experienced consolidation, layoffs and the growing difficulty of transitioning from a print-only media industry to a digital one.
Its acquisition became part of a broader trend at a time when billionaires, many with tech backgrounds, snapped up beleaguered media organizations well-worn from the previous public-private equity cycle.
A few years after Bezos bought The Post, Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought Time Inc. and pharmaceutical director Patrick Soon-Shiong was acquired by the Los Angeles Times.
Bezos, like Benioff and Soon-Shiong (who also blocked his paper’s endorsement of Harris), became close to Trump after winning the 2024 election. His spaceflight company, Blue Origin, relies on federal contracts, and Amazon has faced increased scrutiny under previous administrations.
Lewis was reportedly not present to oversee the layoffs and changes at The Post (Murray told Fox News that the CEO “had a lot to take care of today”). Neither was Bezos. As his newspaper prepares to lay off one-third of its staff, Bezos spent Monday with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Florida, taking him on a tour of the Blue Origin facility.
Less than 48 hours later, The Washington Post would fire a journalist who had covered Blue Origin.
Darkness seems to be creeping in.