Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-post-to-be-sold-to-jeff-bezos/2013/08/05/ca537c9e-fe0c-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html

holy shit, imo

weird

All Post writers to be seasonal temps working in unheated/uncooled warehouses.

Bezos: "Hey, what did you buy today?"
Brin: "Nothing special, bought an expensive hamburger"
Bezos: "Cool. I bought a newspaper."
Brin: "News-pap-per. Lol."
Bezos: "Lol."

All Post writers to be seasonal temps working in unheated/uncooled warehouses.

Richard Cohen, George Will, Sally Quinn, Jennifer Rubin, Charles Krauthammer...not seeing a down side here.

whoah

lol Ned

Makes perfect sense for Washington Post Co. to concentrate on Kaplan. All but a handful of high-profile newspapers will be owned by eccentric oligarchs in the future.

THE BEZOS BUGLE

Breaking news: Jeff Is Thinking of Buying an Island
Weather: Temperature At Jeff's house Is Currently 75 deg F
Money: Jeff Has LOTS!
TV: Jeff Thinks Those Kardashian Girls 'Have a Lot Of Potential'

The good thing is he already knows how to run a company that makes no money.

^^ exactly my thought

Finally, maybe now we'll get a copy of Amazon in print form.

One of my favorite discussions is talking to people who own Amazon stock.

serious question from an ignoramus: if AMZN still doesn't make any money after all these years how does this guy have so much money? is it all based on expected growth of amazon?

Amazon has massive revenue but small net income if I understand.

That's not an unreasonable question to ask. There are a fair number of stocks that reach high valuations without actual "profits" because of exactly what you said -- expected growth/future profits. With Amazon, some observers have questioned those assumptions for a long time, which is why it's not unreasonable to be scratching your head a little. Regardless, his many shares of Amazon (plus, presumably, his previous high income and his high salary) have made him worth billions of dollars, hence he has the money to purchase WaPo out of his personal fortune.

he owns about 20% of Amazon iirc, so his stock on paper (which he can't really sell of course) is probably worth about $28 billion.

I didn't understand.

you're not wrong that they have massive revenue with little to no net income, that's just not the whole explanation. Companies that have massive revenue but no net income often watch their stock prices drop, not rise.

There have been a few Slate pieces (Slate now owned by Amazon? No, he just bought the paper, right, not WaPo Inc?) on how Bezos has been able to successfully deal with the shareholders, expanding the company without doing the profit dance shareholders usually demand.

Here's one: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/10/26/amazon_profits_they_don_t_exist_but_the_company_keeps_on_keeping_on.html

he bought the Washington Post and some other local papers, but not Slate or the rest of the Post Co.

you're not wrong that they have massive revenue with little to no net income, that's just not the whole explanation. Companies that have massive revenue but no net income often watch their stock prices drop, not rise.

A lot of shareholders are hedging on Amazon's market entrenchment and distribution/logistics systems, which are significant. Many see AMZN as a long term play and actually a rather stable long term play given the massive revenues at stake. Amazon Prime and their cloud services have been game changers.

But like I said, it's usually a fascinating discussion with shareholders.

was wondering if there'd be a reference to John Mitchell's 1972 'wringer' comment in his letter and amazingly there is.

A lot of shareholders are hedging on Amazon's market entrenchment and distribution/logistics systems, which are significant. Many see AMZN as a long term play and actually a rather stable long term play given the massive revenues at stake. Amazon Prime and their cloud services have been game changers.

All of this is true, but it seems like the goalpoasts keep moving.

There's no trick to it, it's just a simple trick

multi-billion-dollar companies HATE him

it's amazing how low $250 mil sounds, lol newspapers

a shame Bezos can't buy Howard Fineman, Bobby Woodward, Tina Brown -- stuck on "Morning Joe" -- and plunge them into a dungeon.

informative article:

..."Since inception Amazon has generated $20.2 billion from operations almost half of which ($8.6 B), has been used for capital expenditures such as new distribution centers, which improve life for the customer. In the past ten years the share base has only increased by just over 10% while the company has grown twelve-fold. For shareholders it doesn’t get better than that..."

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130805231302-25760-stop-the-presses-a-new-press-lord-appears

Top reporters still do important work, and hopefully Bezos will find a way to profit from it that's better than selling unpersonalized ads in a dying medium.

Amazon is basically becoming the Standard Oil of consumer products. Although Standard Oil was profitable much sooner.

Ok here's something I don't understand: Bezos pays $250m to the Washington Post Company for the Post and other properties, and WPO stock goes up by $31+/share, which times 7.4million shares is around $250 million. But it's not like the company just gained $250 million out of thin air, they sold assets that were arguably worth that amount, if not more.

WPO can reinvest the $250m money in Kaplan which is a profit-making business, unlike the Post. They've cut a loss-making arm that wasn't relevant to their core business and can now put more money into (i'd guess) expanding test prep and colleges in China.

First act of Bezos (retrospectively, via time machine): prevent Richard Cohen from writing about the time he was cheated on.

Hurting I know that you know that stock prices (can) go up on speculation, and the speculation (I guess) is that dropping off bad assets can increase the future value of shares (in the eyes of some investors.) And also, not really sure if it's wise to speculate on the exact amount of increased share value based on one day of trading but certainly there are buyers at the end of the day who are making decisions based on market cap.

That Cohen column is mind boggling.

Also: http://www.jackflack.com/2013/08/06/parsing-jeff-bezos/

xp

I hate MG but this is interesting:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/bezos-not-bozos/

I had always known precisely how I would react if she cheated on me. The relationship would end, swiftly, coldly, even sneeringly. My goodbye lines would be scathing, worthy of someone intending to make his living with words

That techcrunch article doesn't amount to much more than "Bezos is really smart, so he must know what he's doing with this." Maybe he just thinks the Washington Post is undervalued. Buffet thinks newspapers are undervalued too. Bezos doesn't happen to have any special knowledge of the newspaper industry, afaik, he's just making a bet. He might be right or wrong, but I don't see how it plays into some grand strategy (particularly as it's Bezos himself buying WaPo, not Amazon).

Bloomberg story on Jeff Bezos

• Boss lacks empathy, creates billion-dollar corporation, doesn't know or care about real dad who abandoned him.

• Weird to see Walmart as the underdog taking a loss.

• These door desks, if there is a scourge of the 90s, it's these whimsical ideas about work culture - from bouncy balls in the hallways to these door desks. I don't even like casual Fridays, so maybe I just hate fun.

• Former president of my company used to send me ? emails. I sent him back replies that said ?? a couple of times. Then again, he wasn't Jeff Bezos either.

The door desks are, hypothetically, "frugal" and are not particularly whimsical. There's really very little whimsy here. Compared to Google offices which generally seem to be described as expensive playgrounds for programmers.

The laugh is definitely distinctive and disturbing though, even experiencing it from a distance at one of those KeyArena Q+As.

whimsy's not the right word, but the whole Think Different by doing goofball shit.

even frugal is questionable--i thought i remembered reading somewhere that they effectively break even after the necessary mods

iirc the desk doors are a monument to frugality, but normal cheap desks would be waaay actually more frugal.

its ostentatious underconsumption

lol yeah that sounds about right. It's not like Seattle doesn't have an Ikea.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1aajuNUcAEZwj1.jpg

omg

What's the estimate on the number of WaPo staff members currently cleaning out their desks?

I'm missing something here.

thats the dude symbol in the cover. it has a penis. the womens symbol has a plus.

lol epic fail

hahaha

got it!

I was looking for a typo.

haha my goodness

at least they made it pink

Since November the Post has been by far the place I've read the most anti-Trump articles, far more than NYT

If WaPo is anything like NYT, its never had as strong a subscription campaign as the Trump victory.

Somehow, I suspect Trump will also be paradoxically good for Prius and Tesla sales. "We can't depend upon Fed incentives anymore"...

has anyone made that cover blunder into the prince manwoman insignia yet

Hand to heart, I've been wondering the same thing. And also wishing that they'd made that mistake instead.

There's remarkably few stock images for "female symbol crowd". On the other hand, there's plenty of image taken of this Filipino assembly for Int'l Woman's Day, 2014.

http://www.usasianpost.com/wp-content/uploads/women.jpg

Bezos eats an iguana

https://www.instagram.com/p/BiVjJ7RgJlq/

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/the-freshman-komodo-dragon-2.jpg?quality=95&w=600

lizard person is cannibal

Bezos eats an iguana

oh goody! with a bit more digital magic we can have him eating whatever we want right out of our hands.

https://addictedtohorrormovies.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/dream-device.jpg

On the top of the WaPo website, just beneath the bona fides, there's a little row of clickbait stories. They're horrible, but usually at least one looks passably interesting. Today, though, they reached their nadir:

Tucker Carlson John McCain Drug tunnel Cancun 'Free range' parents Yoga ball White males Therapy ducks Hurricane Lane Robin Leach Urban Meyer Kyrie Irving

that unit pretty routinely begs for copy-pasting

John McCain Drug tunnel Cancun

brooklyn's got a winning team

British politician sex

Good to see some of Jeff Bezos' money trickling down to...David Geffen

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-12/bezos-sets-record-with-165-million-beverly-hills-home-purchase

Bought a 2nd house in DC too, plus buying art. Trump’s personal and corporate tax rates are working well for him. He pays nothing

well someone's getting Aerosmith back

pic.twitter.com/TVBnIYPtyL

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) June 10, 2021

just checking to see if democracy has died in the dark yet

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3ju6TRWUAADR02?format=jpg&name=large

Opinions by
Megan McArdle

lotta people upset about the "Libs of Tiktok" lady getting "doxxed" today! I forget, is freedom of speech bad now?

#wiegeled

Seems like an overreaction

perhaps. but also perhaps karma for the worse things he's tweeted

nevertheless, i have no idea how FS continues to work in that environment

welp

WaPo has fired Felica Sonmez. https://t.co/nT6ch0lIsc

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) June 9, 2022

Damn, they suspended Weigel for that? Whatever happened to the whole “retweets are not endorsements” thing?

https://i.imgur.com/GPLjwwB.png

Yeah, saw that. https://open.substack.com/pub/anntelnaes/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.

For me, 'personal liberties' are the freedom to assemble, freedom of speech in opinion pieces, and freedom from fucking cops hassling me
'Free markets' is the flea market - everything else is an illusion

Hamilton Nolan called it in 2021:

Bezos has given the paper the resources to be bigger and better, and, by most accounts, pretty much stayed out of the newsroom’s hair, besides appearing one day to present a bicycle to former editor Marty Baron. ... There is no guarantee, however, that that will always be true. No one as central to a nation’s fundamental political and economic issues–inequality, corporate power, the future of work–as Jeff Bezos can stay out of the mud of the public discourse forever.

... The wealthy read their own press, and they don’t like things they own to work directly against their interests. These two facts mean that the editorial independence of the Post should never be taken for granted. I doubt there would ever be anything so gauche as a call from Bezos directly to the paper’s editor. But when both sides know that the economic fate of the paper and all of its employees is completely in one man’s hands, unmistakable signals can be sent, if Bezos chooses to send them.

I'm sure Bezos would say that he's still not interfering with the newsroom, only with the opinion page. But this is much farther than a lot of people ever thought he would go.

Liberal opinion columnists Philip Bump, Perry Bacon Jr., and Jonathan Capehart have all left the paper this week. (Bump and Capehart announced that they had accepted buyouts; Bacon announced that he had accepted a position at the New Republic.)

And Alexandra Petri left a couple of months ago.

This comes after a letter last week from the new opinion editor, Adam O'Neal:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:efxbtouacf2s2pzcvuv47ns2/bafkreiawwlmahq2xr5dcee5kwwk7akzifb5hwxnw3rv2sx5nnizvxhmttm@jpeg

"Advocating for free markets and personal liberties will be critical... It is also important that we communicate with optimism about this country and the future in general."

-- Adam O'Neal --

"You can have any color of Model-T that you want, as long as it's black."

-- Henry Ford --

Speaking of which, Karen Attiah noted that she's "the last Black staff columnist left in the Washington Post's opinion section." There were at least three others a few months ago: Bacon, Capehart, and Eugene Robinson.

...and Catherine Rampell out, too. Whew.

Glenn Kessler sucks, but this is quite damning of the new leadership at the Post:

glennkessler.substack.com/p/why-i-left-the-washington-post

Speaking of which, Karen Attiah noted that she's "the last Black staff columnist left in the Washington Post's opinion section."

And now she's been fired for her Bluesky posts about the Charlie Kirk killing, expressing sentiments that would not be out of place in an opinion column:
https://karenattiah.substack.com/p/the-washington-post-fired-me-but

I came here to post the very thing.

Matt Murray and new op editor doing so much damage to my hometown paper

she's not the last black staff columnist. but very sad about this

in her substack, she said she had been the "last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist" at the Post. maybe full-time is the important qualifier there? idk.

my guess would be "opinion" as opposed to finance (e.g. Michelle Singletary) or other depts

Sure, but I said "opinion" back in July. Not sure what fpsa is arguing with.

Colby King is still a full time columnist I think. Don't want to focus too much on it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/colbert-i-king/

No, he retired this month or is about to: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/20/colbert-king-retiring-washington-post-35-years/

at least we can all agree the overwhelming direction of their opinion section is going to shit regardless of who the last one standing is