300 journalists lost their jobs The Washington Post. More than 300,000 readers have canceled their subscriptions. Owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the storied publication in 2013, has driven his reputation into the ground by using his sprawling empire to churn out content designed to please President Donald Trump: Amazon MGM Studios spent $40 million to produce a condescending documentary about Melania Trump that premiered days before Post they sent out mass layoff notices. And yet he won nothing from his attempts to impersonate Donald Trump — at least nothing that was a net benefit to his bottom line..
Which begs the cynical question: Why do they even own one? Tea The Washington Post at all?
The Trump era is, after all, a cynical and transactional one. Billionaires, CEOs, and world leaders quickly realized that vacuuming Trump would get them what they wanted—pardons, exemptions from tariffs, removal of export controls, approval of a merger agreement, suspension of investigations. And when it comes to media companies, the Paramount-Skydance tie-up set the bar for vacuuming Trump. To get regulatory approval for the merger, Skydance CEO David Ellison got CBS to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump, dismissed The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and hired Bari Weiss, a right-wing Substacker with virtually zero newsroom experience, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. In short, Ellison had to commit to neutering CBS’s ability to criticize Trump. But he he did get a $28 billion merger out of it.
Bezos’s media games, on the other hand, seem contradictory. Funding a condescending documentary about Melania Trump does not sit well with owning a media company with a 150-year legacy of holding politicians accountable, especially one that made Trump famous during his first administration. (If the goal was to castrate Post his deputy Will Lewis then confusedly fired everyone as well besides for those at political desks.) Even his attempt to separate political views from PostHis journalism, an attempt at both, failed. After he announced that the opinion page would now reflect more conservative views, reporters began to leave Post in droves and the number of subscribers fell even further. Like PostFormer editor-in-chief Marty Baron put it in a column shortly after the firing, it was “an almost immediate, suicidal destruction of the brand”.
One could argue – as WaPo insiders have to media reporters — that the layoffs were necessary because the paper was losing money. But billionaires have plenty of ways to save an unprofitable media outlet from their hands, in a way that doesn’t involve mass layoffs (or at least transfer the layoffs to its next owner). The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, it was donated by its billionaire owner to a non-profit organization, while Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes eventually sold it New Republic Win McCormack after his own failed attempt to remake the 100-year-old magazine. Tea Post, which has grown its digital audience throughout Bezos’ ownership, would immediately attract buyers: last year, tech journalist Kara Swisher announced that she and several investors were ready to buy Post from Bezos, but reportedly never heard back from him.
Perhaps Bezos needs to absorb Trump to further Amazon’s interests, which would make more sense if Bezos were still running the company. Except it doesn’t. He stepped down as CEO in 2021. Amazon, whose AWS subsidiary holds the lion’s share of federal government contracts, was able to independently absorb Trump through donations to the new White House ballroom fund. (Of course, Bezos’ government contracts with NASA are on the table, and he was reportedly spotted hanging out with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin’s Florida facility on Post dismissal.)
Perhaps this pile of opposites—or, as he once described his ownership Post“complexizer” — was inevitable when Trump returned to office and made it clear he would punish big tech entities he displeased. But there’s no clear, logical explanation for why Bezos is accepting his plea: not one that makes financial sense, not one that immediately bolsters his own political standing with Trump, and not one that reaffirms the commitment he once pledged to protect the First Amendment. And this lack of clarity only makes Post’decapitation even more senseless.