Now, nearly a decade after he bought the Post, Bezos has a leadership team at the company that is entirely his own. “These billionaires, they like to be heard,” Wasserman said. And Bezos appears to have shaken off whatever reluctance he might have had to getting involved in politics, “picking gratuitous policy-related fights with the White House.” In July, he accused Biden of “straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.”Īmazon has never been bashful about its political goals: its $20 million annual lobbying budget, which makes it the second-highest corporate spender in Washington, has been ruthlessly effective at fending off privacy protections, antitrust issues, internet regulation, tougher labor laws, and greater worker protection.Īmazon has become “almost a poster child for tech-fueled bigness run amok,” said Edward Wasserman, a media ethicist, professor, and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley.

In May, Bezos started posting highly provocative anti-Biden tweets, mocking the president’s moves to expose corporate greed and increase taxes on the wealthy. Recent moves have called renewed attention to how Bezos’s ownership constitutes a massive and almost entirely unaddressed conflict of interest for the Post. The very existence of people as rich as Bezos clashes with the notion of economic fairness. Pretty much every public-policy issue the Post covers affects Bezos’s sprawling personal and business interests in material ways. Bezos’s money changed everything, bulking up the newsroom, revolutionizing its technology, and firmly reestablishing it as a dominant voice in the national media.īut the conflicts of interest are self-evident. The Post was in a downward spiral, sloughing off staff and flirting with irrelevance. In 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family, those complications were not top of mind. For a news organization, being owned by an oligarch can be complicated.

Jeff bezos before and after