Jeff Bezos could save The Washington Post, but he won’t. Here’s why
News that The Washington Post had laid off hundreds of workers and scrapped several sections of the storied paper altogether stunned the journalism community last week. The Post cut roughly one-third of its staff, reduced local coverage, and completely destroyed its sports and international departments.
The paper is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder, who has a staggering net worth of approximately $250 billion, bought the Post for $250 million in 2013. The newspaper has consistently lost more money than it has made since the 2020 election, yet has long been considered a stalwart of American dailies.
But last week, the Post’s editor-in-chief Matt Murray told employees the layoffs were part of a “strategic reset” meant to attract more customers. Though he acknowledged the cuts were “painful,” the overall messaging seemed to be that they were necessary.
Of course, not everyone agrees. Martin Baron, who served as the outlet’s executive editor until 2021, told The Guardian: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
But one question has persistently risen out of the fog of disappointment and disillusionment: If Jeff Bezos understood that owning such a vital newspaper was a “sacred trust,” why is he no longer willing to keep it running at a loss for a tiny percentage of his net worth?
Yes, the financial optics for The Washington Post aren’t the most promising: The New York Times reported in 2022 that the Post’s online ad revenue fell to $70 million that year, a 15% drop from 2021. Last year the number of print subscriptions fell to below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years. The Post hoped to gain 5 million digital subscribers by 2025; in late 2024, the outlet reported having approximately 2.5 million digital subscribers. And the Post lost $177 million in 2023 and 2024 combined, per The New Yorker.
Trebor Scholz, a scholar-activist and associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City who has authored several books on labor and economics, hinted that it might just be that Bezos simply doesn’t find the Post “useful” anymore. Bezos is a businessman first and foremost, and if the paper isn’t making money, cuts have to be made. “I think financially, [the Post] is not a great consideration for him, right?” Scholz says. He also pointed out that Bezos may have “lost interest” in the newspaper after owning it for several years, and called to mind Elon Musk’s decision to purchase X (then called Twitter) in 2022.
Musk intended to own the social media platform as a means to “control discourse” and “swing the political atmosphere in a particular direction,” Scholz says. That plan appears to have worked, he added, as X—which was considered an online gathering space for politically engaged people of all persuasions during Twitter’s heyday—is now “fairly useless for social movements” and has “really turned into this sort of toxic right-wing space.” The platform has spent considerable time and money battling a surge in bots and misinformation since Musk’s takeover.
The Post isn’t the only newspaper that’s been taken over by a seemingly “benevolent billionaire,” Christina Bellantoni, director of the USC Annenberg Media Center and a former Los Angeles Times editor, told Fast Company by phone. Patrick Soon-Shiong swooped in to save the Los Angeles Times in 2018, when he paid $500 million for the paper, a transaction that was initially celebrated by the media.
But Soon-Shiong’s decision to order the paper to cancel its endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election pushed most of its editorial staff out, and the outlet began to lose money. He fired 20% of the paper’s staff in the same year, and in late 2025 Soon-Shiong announced plans to take the paper public.
Soon-Shiong didn’t buy the paper just to come in and fire people, Bellantoni said. “I think he really did believe in himself and the ability to save it, to turn it around and make it this thing he’d be very proud of and also make money on,” she added. “That’s not what happened, and I think people are really angry about him — but also because they’re mad they put him on a pedestal.”
Both newspapers benefitted from the surge in public interest in reading the news that marked the first Trump administration; both ended up gutted by their owners after later declining to endorse a political candidate in 2024 (on top of that, both owners have been criticized for their professional and personal ties to the Trump administration). That decision “caused a lot of damage” for the Post and the Times, Bellantoni also said. Subscribers departed both in large numbers despite the pleas of journalists to stick with them.
But things can also work out: in 2013 John Henry (who founded his own investment firm and is the owner of several sports teams, including the Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Penguins), paid $70 million for the Boston Globe. Though print subscriptions to the paper have dropped, digital subscriptions are over 250,000.
The intersection of morality and business isn’t one-size-fits-all, which makes questions of Bezos’ own internal philosophy toward the Post and the value of the free press difficult to discern. After all, he could have just shut the paper down, Bellantoni noted, but he didn’t.
“Obviously, he knows how important the Post is — that’s why he bought it,” she said. “And I think he does know its value … and in the end, you know, if he wanted to kill it, he could do that too.”
The Post is “still doing great journalism every day, and there are a lot of people there who really care about their work,” Bellantoni concluded. “And so the question is: what’s next?”
To that end, Bezos has praised the newspaper’s “essential journalistic mission” and said he will continue to focus on the data that “tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” Though conversations about data over the enormous benefits the public can reap from a fully-staffed, storied news outlet such as the Post raise the hackles of some (as former Post Opinions writer Molly Roberts put it, “Democracy dies in ‘The Data’”), business owners have been data-driven for years.
The Post is and will continue to produce great work, Bellantoni said, “and in the end, there will always be that institutional love for the Washington Post because it has been there forever, and it has had such an important place in society, whether it is struggling financially or not.”
The tale of what happened after Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post may be a “cautionary tale” to billionaires everywhere who invest in the news in the future.
“This is not a recipe for lining your pockets with money anymore. It’s a hard, expensive industry to finance.”