Who Will Be the Washington Post’s Next Owner?
Bezos could sell to Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Zucker, or Melinda French Gates
Anyone who has paid much attention to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos over the years knows that he isn’t afraid to shut down something that isn’t working. In 2015, Amazon pulled the plug on its Fire smartphone, after announcing a $170 million writedown on unsold devices. In 2019, Bezos finalized a divorce from his wife of 25 years. In 2022, Amazon announced it would close down all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores and retail shops. In 2023, Amazon discontinued its Amazon Smile program that let customers direct a portion of their purchases to charity. Earlier this year, Bezos announced he was ending his residency in the state of Washington after nearly 30 years, and moving to Florida.
“Embrace failures” is part of Amazon’s “Day 1 culture,” along with “high-velocity decision-making.” Implicit in that is recognizing when something is not working and isn’t worth keeping trying to get working, rather than indefinitely pretending that sometime in the future it will start working.
I haven’t spoken with Bezos about it, but from the outside it seems clear that The Washington Post, which Bezos bought for $250 million in 2013, is at “high velocity” of approaching Fire phone-MacKenzie Scott-Washington-state residency status. That is, Bezos is going to conclude, if he hasn’t already, that it is more trouble than it is worth, and that it’s time to move on to something different.
The newspaper is losing lots of money—reportedly on the order of $77 million a year—and rather than adding to Bezos’s reputation it is damaging it. The coverage of Israel is as approximately as hostile as Al Jazeera; the Washington Free Beacon found “at least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for” that “news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar, which is now sheltering Hamas’s top leaders.” Republicans and some centrists dislike the paper’s anti-Trump tilt, and even Bezos, who is vaguely libertarian and likes America, has to wonder why readers would pay for a Washington Post dispensing predictably left-wing takes readily available free-of-charge from NPR.
Now the Post staff is worked up into a panic over a British former Wall Street Journal executive’s plan to bring in editors from the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph to run the place. The supposed trigger is the British press’s use of “stolen” documents, but that seems like a pretext coming from the staff of a newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers. The real issue isn’t stolen documents (the Post staff didn’t mind when the New York Times published President Trump’s stolen tax return) but fear that the new Post management might curb the left-wing tilt. Whatever the motive, Bezos is under fire from his own staff, which is questioning his loyalty to the institution. One Post veteran editor and reporter, the biographer David Maraniss, posted on Facebook, “Jeff Bezos owns the Post but he is not of and for the Post.”
If Bezos can sell for $500 million or $1 billion, he can say he doubled or quadrupled his initial investment over a decade, while winning a bunch of Pulitzer Prizes and helping to protect the country from President Trump. “Democracy dies in darkness,” as the Post’s Trump-administration-era slogan had it. Amazon has paused construction on the second phase of its Arlington, Virginia second headquarters. Bezos may figure the Washington Post isn’t worth owning through a second Trump term.
So if Bezos is selling, who might be buying? Here are some possibilities, from most likely to least likely:
The Atlantic: Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg was a Washington Post reporter early in his career and has staffed the news organization, based in Washington, with Washington Post alumni, including Elizabeth Bruenig, Barton Gellman, Hanna Rosin, Mark Leibovich, and Anne Applebaum. With backing from Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and involvement from Jobs aide Peter Lattman, the Atlantic has a lot of intellectual and demographic overlap with what the Washington Post could be at its best—an events business, an internet business with some value-added rather than mere commodity news. Ideologically, you get the internationalism and national security hawkishness of the classic, Graham-family owned Washington Post in its prime, along with the anti-Trump elements of the Bezos-era Washington Post. There are synergies, as the investment bankers are surely trying to tell Laurene Jobs! It’s a shiddach, as Goldberg and Lattman might say. Lattman, who I’m a fan of, didn’t reply to a message I sent him, which could mean any number of things, including that they are looking at it and therefore he can’t discuss it.
Politico/Axel Springer: Politico global editor-in-chief John F. Harris started as a summer intern at the Washington Post and spent 21 years there before leaving to start Politico. Axel Springer bought Politico in 2021 for about $1 billion. Politico may figure it can just let the Washington Post wither and die rather than spend a lot of money to purchase a declining competitor. On the other hand, at some price it might make sense to increase the company’s market share and solidify its dominance of Beltway-business news. Axel Springer’s German ownership and private equity ownership (KKR) might create some political obstacles.
Jeff Zucker: Former CNN and NBC executive Jeff Zucker tried to buy London’s Telegraph and Spectator with money from the United Arab Emirates, reportedly with a plan to expand into the U.S. If he’s looking for a news media brand to buy, the Washington Post certainly has potential, and Zucker could use it as a platform for a comeback and for a rematch with Trump, his old NBC “Apprentice” star.
Axios/Jim VandeHei/Mike Allen: Axios cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are also former Washington Post people who started up Politico with Harris. They announced a sale to Cox Enterprises at a $525 million valuation in 2022. They may be happier running Axios than dealing with the unions and complainers at the Washington Post, but they are also ambitious enough that the idea of returning as owner-managers would have an appeal to them.
Graham Holdings: The Graham family has a sentimental attachment to the newspaper and wants it to flourish rather than wither, die, or become a laughingstock. Their company, Graham Holdings, owns Slate and Foreign Policy magazine, as well as some local television stations and a bunch of Washington-area car dealerships. They probably aren’t going to pay Bezos more for the Post than they sold it to him for, but they might take it back from him at the same price he paid for it back in 2013, the same way Bezos might allow a customer to return a package from Amazon.com.
Melinda French Gates: The Washington Post has a great history of female leaders, including Watergate-era publisher Katharine Graham and editorial page editor Meg Greenfield. Melinda French Gates, a philanthropist interested in women’s issues, was close to Warren Buffett, who was pals with Katharine Graham and whose Berkshire Hathaway was a Washington Post Company shareholder. Buffett was a Washington Post paperboy as a youth. It’s a long shot, but she has the money available.
Newhouse/Remnick: New Yorker editor David Remnick is another former Washington Post journalist. The Newhouse family that owns the New Yorker also owns newspapers and reportedly made a bunch of money with an investment in Reddit. Newhouse probably has enough newspapers already. Remnick is roughly seven years older than Jeff Goldberg and lives in New York City, not Washington, so this also seems improbable, but not so improbable that Remnick or a Newhouse might not find it tempting at the right price.
Jared Kushner: President Trump’s son-in-law has experience in the media business as the owner of the New York Observer, and he, like Zucker, potentially has Persian Gulf investor money to put to work. Kushner is smart enough to realize that if this is a money-losing headache for Jeff Bezos, it would be for him, too, and the value to President Trump of subtracting a hostile Washington Post from the media playing field is nowhere near $250 million plus annual losses.
Miriam Adelson: Dr. Adelson, widow of politically active Republican businessman Sheldon Adelson, owns two other newspapers, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Israel Hayom. I have a hard time seeing Bezos putting it in her hands or in Kushner’s, because he wouldn’t want it to be pro-Trump.
The New York Times Company: The New York Times coverage of Bezos and Amazon has been so hostile that it may cost the Ochs-Sulzberger family a chance to consolidate the left-wing national newspaper market. The Times spends freely on acquisitions. It used to run the International Herald Tribune as a 50-50 partnership with the Washington Post. The Times doesn’t really need to buy the Washington Post. It’s already winning the competition for paying subscribers interested in left-leaning news, and if it wants to hire away any talent from the Post, it can just do that without paying money to Jeff Bezos. Whether A.G. Sulzberger is shrewd enough to know that and say no to the investment bankers, who knows, but it may not matter, because the New York Times is about the last place to which Bezos wants to sell his newspaper.
Who am I missing?
Does it matter who owns the Washington Post, or even if it stays in business? At the height of its power, the newspaper helped to topple (or hound out of office) President Nixon with its Watergate coverage. It was such a powerhouse of stylish, literary journalism that in the 1980s for a year or so I had a mail subscription that was delivered, days or weeks late but still worth reading, to my home in Central Massachusetts. Its editorial page was home to voices such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and it editorialized in favor of school choice in D.C. schools. And after Natan Sharansky was freed from the Soviet Union, he asked to meet Stephen Rosenfeld, who had written many of those Washington Post editorials advocating on his behalf.
It could be that today’s Wills and Krauthammers are on Substack, as the entry barriers of printing and distribution that existed in the pre-Internet age no longer exist. As the founders of Politico and Axios realized, nowadays the reputations for trustworthiness reside more in the bylines of individual journalists than in the legacy newspaper names. The value is the reporters and editors, not the presses, archives, or delivery trucks. Even so, and even as the influence of such newspapers wanes, there aren’t that many other newspapers like the Washington Post. After the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the Washington Post is the next national newspaper, the only one of those big three actually based in the political capital rather than in the financial and cultural capital (although Miami is gaining in the financial and cultural league tables, as are Dallas and Austin). So for $250 million or $500 million, if Bezos is indeed selling, the voice that is the Washington Post might yet have some things to report and stand for that, for the right buyer, might make it worth the price.
Thank you: I could never get the Washington Post to make me a columnist, though Fred Hiatt was always totally gracious about it when I tried. This site is reader-supported. If you appreciate independent journalism and the media analysis, please become a paying subscriber today.