The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change. On the other hand, Blue Origin reportedly loses multiple billions of $ per year, and has done for decades, which Bezos pumps in without insisting on massive cuts or layoffs.
> The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change.
You don't even "might understand" this, because you're intelligent enough to grasp that its profitability as a newspaper was never a factor in Bezos' desire to purchase the WP.
There is quite a bit of difference between not making a profit and consistently losing around $100m a year with apparently no path to at least revenue neutrality.
So it loses pocket change for a multi billionaire?
Edit: The consideration being that perhaps billionaire toys need not be profitable per se, but are purchased for different reasons. Twitter is another example here.
That's assuming the pro-billionaire propaganda it produces doesn't make him many hundreds of millions more.
In that light an arbitrary but vaguely plausible reason to fire anyone who insists on doing actual journalism and not billionaire propaganda is a useful tool.
There's an obvious difference between the two in that Blue Origin is the gateway to multibillion dollar prospective markets that current have virtually no incumbents (other than one very big obvious one). Whereas the WP does not have any prospective future growth trajectory whatsoever b/c it's competing with the endless turd spigot that is social media.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
Here's a controversial opinion -- it's actually always been this way.
Hearst used his newspapers to manipulate the American public into war against the Spanish Empire.
Government lies (babies in incubators, yellow cake...) were used to push two Iraq wars on the American public by the media.
The abnormal thing is that we had maybe 10-15 years where the press put up at least a pretense of acting impartial as power shifted from pineapple and arms companies to tech monopolies.
I think the bigger change is that wealth is continuing to concentrate. The more wealth accrues under a few hands the more these people are able to exploit disproportionate control over the information environment.
BO definitely does layoffs, and is run just as awfully as Amazon (look who the CEO of BO is as of 2024). Doesn’t matter if you’re in an office or on the manufacturing floor, the hours and demands are terrible there. Everyone I know that has worked there echoed the same problems that Amazon had.
So it's a cost center. Exactly like the public relations tool that WP is. Until due to cuts public loses interest in it, at which point it ceases to be an effective tool and keeps being only a cost center.
Rich businessmen have expensive hobbies, and those can look a lot like real businesses. Jeff could also buy a couple oceanographic research vessels tomorrow, spend a few years looking for sunken Spanish treasure ships, then get bored and sell the whole "business" in a liquidation auction.
Yes, Jeff and his companies keep making idealistic, pro-social statements. Unfortunately, such statements are little more than socially mandated lies. Which millions of people really want to believe - so be cautious about calling them out.
The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.
Wikipedia says it "had the highest opening for a non-concert documentary since the $10.7 million opening for Chimpanzee (2012)".
It did well by documentary standards, poorly compared to its budget, and the stories about empty theaters are mostly in areas with very weak Trump support. Those stories spread mainly because they makes us feel good.
It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
