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Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.”
Billionaire Jeff Bezos’S Washington Post on Wednesday cut one-third of its staff, including around 300 members of the newsroom, a journalistic bloodbath that marks a shift from the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” era back into darkness.
Defenders of the executive team’s decisions have cited declining subscriptions and revenue as the reasons why the company needs to tighten its belt. But for Bezos, who could leverage his net worth, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 billion, to run the paper at a loss for generations to come, these cuts to a trusted news organization are an ideological, rather than commercial, choice — and the Amazon founder is more responsible than anyone for the change in the Washington Post’s fortunes.
After promising Post employees that he’d take a hands-off approach to the newsroom and let journalists do their jobs when he bought the Post in 2013, Bezos dramatically changed course in late October 2024 when he killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president over Donald Trump. That made Bezos, and the Washington Post itself, enemies of the liberal audience the newsroom had been cultivating for a decade and beyond. More than 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions in the wake of Bezos’s intervention, a massive loss of revenue for an already struggling business.
Reporters at the paper could see what was coming and appealed to readers not to punish the newsroom. “Please don’t cancel your subscriptions,” wrote Amanda Morris, a disability reporter who resigned from the paper last May, in a prescient post. “It won’t impact Bezos — it hurts journalists and makes another round of layoffs more likely.”
Morris was right. Unsubscribing has had no effect on Bezos’s appeasing of Trump, and he has continued to go out of his way to flatter the 47th president. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 presidential inaugural committee, and Bezos attended the ceremony, one of a murderer’s row of tech billionaires who stood near the president on the dais in the Capitol rotunda, flanked by other Silicon Valley titans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai.
There’s always more than enough money to go around, except if you’re a working journalist.
One month later, in February 2025, Bezos restructured the opinion section along explicitly ideological grounds, writing in a memo to staff: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
It’s paying off. On Monday, two days before the layoffs, the billionaire welcomed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to his Blue Origin spaceport in Florida for a mutual backslapping affair — highlighting yet another Bezos business that’s benefiting from public money in the form of a Space Force contract worth more than $2 billion, which was announced last April. Hegseth posted on X that the company was “building The Arsenal of Freedom.”
Bezos replied that it was a “huge honor” to have Trump’s war chief to visit. “The whole team here was energized by your visit, and we’re excited to be doing our part to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America. Thank you!” he said.
There’s always more than enough money to go around, except if you’re a working journalist. Amazon’s “Melania” debuted on January 30, just days before the layoffs; the documentary reportedly paid the first lady around $28 million of its $40 million budget, leading former executive Ted Hope, who helped start Amazon’s film division, to wonder: “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe?”
The Washington Post isn’t the only newsroom to see the right-wing politics of its owner lead to backlash and a loss of revenue followed closely by cuts. At the Los Angeles Times, a similar dynamic played out after billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong declined to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris on October 22, 2024, just three days before Bezos did the same.
Subscriptions dropped by the thousands, though not to the extent they did at the Post; in October 2025, as ownership sought a $500 million investment, they reported $50 million in losses attributed primarily to the time period after the non-endorsement. The LA Times has been hit with extensive layoffs in the newsroom, another example of employees paying the price for ownership playing at right-wing politics.
This rightward turn, with job cuts framed as a necessary evil to tighten up a floundering business, was also on display at CBS News, where Trump ally David Ellison appointed conservative ideologue Bari Weiss to run the show after his media company Skydance bought the network last fall. One of the first orders of business was cutting staff, which came a month after the purchase.
In each case, the driving forces appear to be the political priorities of billionaires and their desire to avoid Trump’s wrath and curry his favor — while massively benefiting their bottom line with media mergers and lucrative government contracts. Soon-Shiong’s multibillion-dollar fortune is built on the health care industry, particularly on drugs he’s developed like Anktiva, which rely on FDA approval. Ellison is shamelessly ingratiating himself to Trump for more media merger approval, a strategy that’s working for the whole family: Patriarch Larry just led a bid to take over American operations of TikTok with the president’s blessing.
Bezos in particular has an interest in keeping Trump happy. The president won’t hesitate to punish enemies or the disloyal by yanking federal contracts, and AWS, Amazon’s web services division, relies on the government for billions of its annual revenue. The relationship between the White House and Amazon has already sparked outrage, especially over AWS’s contracting with ICE for more than $140 million, but money in the bank speaks louder than protests against one of the world’s largest and most ubiquitous companies.
A rigorous, adversarial news media is not in the best interest of the ultra-wealthy.
Amazon continues to rake in hundreds of millions annually — at least — in federal dollars through its cloud contracts, not only for ICE, but also in agencies and departments across the government. While there’s no solid number for the average annual value all these contracts amount to, it’s enough that AWS was able to promise $1 billion in savings to the federal government in 2025 through a cloud updating and consolidation deal through the end of 2028.
Those staggering profits add insult to injury for Bezos’ now-former employees at the Post, who could have kept their jobs in perpetuity if the billionaire valued the Fourth Estate as much as he’s claimed. Former editor David Maraniss told the New Yorker that Bezos “bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed. Now I don’t think … he gives a flying fuck.”
This is a crushing blow for the journalists who have lost their jobs. It’s also a real loss for the public at large. But despite his lofty blustering, the good of the public doesn’t matter to Bezos, nor to his ally in the White House. A rigorous, adversarial news media is not in the best interest of the ultra-wealthy and could perhaps even act as a check, however small, on their unending ambitions. Bezos has already reaped the material awards of this administration and will continue to — a few hundred livelihoods be damned.
Billionaires are only benevolent until they’re not, and they certainly can’t be trusted to “save” the news when their self-interest is at stake. The Washington Post layoffs only reinforces the need for a media that isn’t controlled by the capricious whims of the superrich, but one that serves the good of the public. Otherwise, we’re on our own.
