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

I read a newspaper every day for about 40 years until the Post did the non-endorsement. I also quit for my mental health to avoid reading about atrocities every day that I could do nothing about.

I guess if I were to read the Post now I would learn that actually everything is doing great!

apparently Kara Swisher wants to get a group together to buy the Post. I think that'd be better, but also... god am I tired of her history of whitewashing silicon valley

Maybe it’s the Protestant in me and I’ve swallowed the propaganda that one person can make a difference, etc; or being of a German ethnic background raised in Minnesota among Scandinavian Lutherans and living WWII vets, and being told about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “there was no one left to speak up for me” etc.; and taught from a very young age that the German people are collectively responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust and that for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, etc. I’ve absorbed by what may be a neurotic feeling that I have to know what is going on, that to not know about the crimes of the country I was born into is a moral failing for which the future will judge me harshly, and that I have the duty to DO SOMETHING about it.

it's such common received wisdom but if you start to think about some of the assumptions and arguments baked in that stuff even for a minute its insanity and status as pure ideology will start to reveal itself! the only people who will judge you are your children / family / close friends and the people you encounter day to day in-person (and to a much lesser degree online) based on how kindly you treat them and how much love you are able to give them.

an idea i will hazard to put out there in this thread, with the awareness that it is tricky to express, is that there is a bit of an obsession with the holocaust in the liberal imagination, that its role and importance is a little overblown if you take into account the entire history of racial violence that accompanies the human experience since time immemorial, that the strange particularities and confluence of specific contextual events that led to it all happening are too often taken out of context and generalized about to serve ideological ends that feed on people's basic sense of decency and conscience. history actually never repeats itself! the particularities of history never do. many things change hopelessly and ceaselessly. the central battles of human psychology and conscience remain essentially the same, but how they play out look very different from one era to the next as material circumstances of the human experience on this planet push into new spaces continually. i think anyone positing that a particular set of things that happened 100 years ago are going to happen today especially if you stop checking news sites on your phone or whatever are not really thinking it through, or are not admitting how much they don't know.

did the idea of "owning the libs" exist 100 years ago? i don't think it did. but i see that as the driving force behind the right's embrace of fascist aesthetics - the online attention economy. are the results the same? a systematic purge of an entire racial group? i don't think they're the same at all. i see trumpism and today's situation much more as a continuation of an era of randomized and dispersed violence that emerged in tandem with mass media in the 60s and 70s, that continued on into the kind of warfare that the u.s. embraced from the 70s onward, into the age of terrorism and etc., breaking along the racial and class lines that they always have. most of the violence happening around us is on our streets where homeless people are being harassed and "made temporary" to death. take a walk around your city and you'll get a lot more pertinent news about how violence is working now than looking at any news masthead or doomscrolling online will. state violence doesn't need to be bureacratized and orchestrated anymore and "knowing" about what the state is up to through the smokescreen of media institutions is mostly misdirection.

As a bisexual descendant of slaves who possibly would never had been born had my great-grandfather not been lynched in 1948, I feel pretty strongly that map‘s conclusions are deeply ahistorical and easily disproven by five seconds of googling

Which is to say, the abstract policies of „the state“ both reflect and are driven by local conditions. It’s a symbiotic relationship and divorcing them from each other loses important context necessary for driving lasting change

i absolutely agree with that fwiw. and i see what you mean. one example, besides the big one that your experience speaks to, might be if my city and state decided to give more support to a more humane program for homeless people. the people out there who believe in making those changes happen and work with the state to do so are heroes. i'm not built that way but it doesn't mean i don't admire that kind of progress. or that i don't think and believe that big progress has been made in the last 100 years.

the question of whether consuming news affects any of that seems a little different to me though...

did the idea of "owning the libs" exist 100 years ago?

in europe and the USA 100 years ago the analog to our culture wars, just as in the USA of today, had a strong underpinning of religious conservatism reacting against the upsurge of modernism and the rejection of the patriarchy by women, by militant socialists, and just generally by the backlash against authority brought on by WWI. But then, it was the liberals mocking the reactionaries.

"owning the libs" is unusual, because it's a theatrical and frivolous manifestation of reactionary politics, which usually is far more solemn. it feels to me like an outgrowth of Yippie tactics of 1968, but really blossoming out via the internet. they especially love to adopt our language and pervert it to their own ends. the MAGA think it's hilarious.

yeah but we took back the frog!

@grok please summarize whatever the fuck map is talking about

lol sorry guys. i know yall are close to the media and have friends who are affected. didn't mean to go on a galaxy brain tear itt.

tldr life goes on without the washington post and there's even still a lot of good stuff with less media saturation in ur life

yes

ofc billionaires shouldn't exist and whatever can lead to less of them or fewer people with unlimited power and more social conscience generally and less psychotic hyperindividualism we really need it.

“owning the libs” wasn’t against the libs per se but doing venally petty and evil things even when they collectively make your life or even your country worse absolutely was a thing

ending wapo won’t end america’s or anyone’s billionaire crisis.

I was almost used to things I liked or enjoyed or at least relied on enshittifying. But this hurts me deep.

being wrecked by the whims of unfettered capitalism

As someone else pointed out, if you can't make money running a high profile D.C. sports section, that's outright incompetence. That may very well be the cast, but things like the Post or CBS or whatever else these chumps want to destroy, they are tremendously valuable properties, so the fact that they are being allowed to be gutted just emphasizes the vindictiveness of the actions.

Maybe the Onion will buy the Post.

I don't read the news either. I didn't even know who was in the Super Bowl until the squares went up yesterday.

They slashed much of the arts coverage including editor Jon Fischer ( who was once a great Washington City Paper writer & editor where I knew him and he edited my stuff), and classical music critic Michael Andor Brodeur. Also the book section, the sports section, and more .

tldr life goes on without the washington post and there's even still a lot of good stuff with less media saturation in ur life

― map, Wednesday, February 4, 2026 6:36 PM

Well, sure! I sleep easily eight hours a night. And we absolutely need national newspapers with investigative budgets.

That right wing Brit guy Will Lewis who Bezos hired as publisher (despite his involvement in a phone hacking scandal in the UK) is such a jerk--

From a former Washington Post writer's article in the Atlantic:

Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)

Did they keep Chris Richards?

Did they keep Chris Richards?

Is slate owned by bezos as well?

Bezos doesn't own Slate, it's part of the rest of what used to be the Washington Post Co. (now Graham Holdings) — the part that Bezos didn't buy.

Chris Richards was laid off, yes.

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisrichards.bsky.social/post/3me2jk6jj7s24

Well glad my buddy got out of slate when he did regardless. Not sure where to get local news now. Please don’t say popville

popville

Gentrification complete

"WTOP," she said grudgingly.

arlnow I guess

Wtf

Former Washington Post reporters launch GoFundMe to help repatriate international staff who was fired and now facing logistical challenges getting out of their countries and back home. https://t.co/sXGJaUKnR2

— Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) February 7, 2026

Makes u think twice about going into space in a Bezos rocket.

For some reason I thought he shut that program down, too.

no that is why he’s kissing up to Trump so those rocket contracts keep coming

Did we all see this?

https://i.postimg.cc/LXF4V8fg/wp.png

yup

i guess it's like kicking a dead horse at this point

i canceled my subscription when they refused to endorse a presidential candidate and missed the arts coverage, but ever since they axed all the arts coverage I cared about I have no regrets.

xp on what basis do they distinguish them

does who distinguish what?

lol

"For them, disenfranchising Republican voters is the only way to counterbalance the desperate attempts by Republicans in other states to save their congressional majority. They’re right that the GOP started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward.

Both parties have contributed to this mess, and no one knows who will come out ahead. It was never clear that the mid-decade redistricting ploys by Republicans, such as those in Texas and North Carolina, would be enough to prevent defeat in the midterms."

It was bad those guys started the fight, but punching back is just going too far.

One of the writers they didn’t fire, Marc Thiessen, wrote a column this month advising Trump to murder the Iranian negotiators if they don’t agree to a deal quickly.

democracy sighs in darkness

One of the writers they didn’t fire, Marc Thiessen, wrote a column this month advising Trump to murder the Iranian negotiators if they don’t agree to a deal quickly.

― JoeStork, Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Then he went to a Cheap Trick concert in Richmond.

!