"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand the industry he's bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good" feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that's been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years

February 04, 2026 - 14:53 UTC

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He always has the saving grace of playing it off as a deliberate effort to destroy his own asset for political gain.
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this only makes sense if you think right wing billionaires acquire media sources so that they can make them popular and profitable, which is very very wrong
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Looking forward to the Harvard Business School case study "How Private Equity Fucks Up Everything"
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Billionaires are a cancer than invade and destroy everything they touch.
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Thought thus was about Twitter
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bezos is simply following in the grand rich idiot tradition of gannett, advance publications, and many other private newspaper owners before him. he's merely wealthy enough to sink a more prestigious brand than the times-picayune
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It’s herbs all the way down
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Before Gannett, the Des Moines Register was one of the nation's great newspapers, with its own DC bureau. It took home more Pulitzers than any other paper, excepting only the NYT.

Now it's pretty much USA Today with a little local content.
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You don’t think the “newspaper” as a concept slowly dying to the far superior concept of “the internet” has anything to do with this?

When was the last time you saw anyone read the actual Washington Post?

People stare at their phones, skimming through dozens of articles, from different publishers.
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Nathan J Robinson, perhaps?
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The worst part is that he's, what, the second-richest man in the world? He could bankroll the whole thing at a loss and barely notice the spare change he'd lose.

He either doesn't care, or he's doing it deliberately.
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the quote posts are really determined to believe bad things can only have one cause and bad people can only have one motivation. that seems really convenient to me but i guess i'm stupid and naive for noticing patterns that predate 2020
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bezos is also just following in the proud washington tradition of Dan Snyder of being a rich idiot who doesn't understand what makes the thing he bought good
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This why I never respond to corporations' requests for feedback. Of course your customer service is shitty. You intend it to be. It's disgusting that you want to read my complaints for sick kicks.
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i know this is probably a joke but good to remember it’s individual service workers who are getting rated in those surveys, not the corp in general. always give 5 stars
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Starting with Jack welch
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Yes we killed the Golden Goose as it wasn't producing Golden Eggs fast enough to keep up with demand of "millions of eggs every minute," but the shareholders were very happy with the pivot to Golden Fois Gras.
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Has anyone thought of taxing them? Still possible until militaries are privatised.
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Disagree, I think he's actively trying to dismantle it
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Turn it into a right wing propaganda outlet that might make a profit on the side
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At least we can turn to familiar hobbies such as baseball to distract from…

Ah shit, it’s happening to baseball too
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Does he not understand the industry or was WaPo always just a vehicle to advance his agenda, and now that it's not useful he's stripping it for parts?
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He bought the Post to get a seat at the political table. He now has that seat. Now, destroying it helps him more because honest reporting is a threat to his life.
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What's so fucked up about capitalism is how many of these dipshit owners don't understand what they bought into, but were able to make billions anyway.
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Also see rich assholes during the restaurant buying spree: “I love to eat at restaurants, I should own one.”
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I mean it is the driving plot point of Empire Records
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Worse, they buy businesses to destroy things
bsky.app/profile/synapseavoider.bsky.social/post/3me2atyexbk2s
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People think rich === smart. Based on my experience the exact opposite is true.
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I always thought that he was buying it to turn it into a bezos friendly propaganda production house. All other goals were secondary.
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Oh. I thought you were talking about TikTok at first.
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Also, specifically with regard to the Post, Bezos is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If anyone can afford to have a national newspaper run at a loss, its him
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*billions
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More like "smart rich owner pays a lot of money to destroy a going concern because it offends someone he's trying to take yet more money off of."
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🎯
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But Rich dipshit can spend 75 million on a corrupt handout to Melania Trump?
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Well to be fair he did fund the invention of a fucking app. So why shouldn’t he be worshiped as a genius.
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big time in the craft beer industry right now
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"right now" - the last decade at least.
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This logic is also why I don't trust 2nd career tech guys. Is the same deal most of the time.
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Yet another reason we should tax wealth. Maybe if they had less money to destroy us, our utilities, and our cultural institutions, they’d fuck off and leave us alone.
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The crafters, sewists, church quilters and more are still pissed about PE killing JoAnn Fabrics. I can't help but think that this could be an inroad to organizing people who might not otherwise be connected to progressive movements.
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I wonder if this will eventually lead to a new wave of coops and mutual associations again like in the first gilded age.
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And all of the cars that look the same
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Soooooo true, and I’d suggest clueless CEOs (like David Zaslav at Warner Brothers) are all first chair in that orchestra.
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Siesta chips.
Walgreens and rite aid
Native instruments
Twitter

I learned this lesson at the small mom and pop roaster I worked for that was bought by a rich couple who; knew nothing about roasting or marketing both of which made the business happen.
Why wouldn't you just start your own?
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Private equity needs to be outlawed.
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I just read that piece yesterday that points out billionaires are stupid and buy things then get mad when they make it worse by analyzing NFL team purchases. Just feels like that again.
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Can you link that? sounds like a good read
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At some point, everyone thinks, "I know how to do something better than trained experts who have been doing it for decades," but only a few people have the money and connections to try.
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"Increasing shareholder value" has ruined our lives completely.
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The fact that you’re saying this on bluesky and not twitter just deepens it.
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This is every company that was seduced by the prospect of their own Jack Welch to switch leadership from subject matter experts (engineers, journalists, producers) focused on competing int he market to MBAs focused on margin engineering.
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Hello I'm Morgan Freeman here to describe to you most of human history...
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I assumed he did it on purpose. Like you said, he doesn’t need the money. He needs them to stop spreading information.
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Lauren are we talking about American universities!!?
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That's partially true, but ignoring the malice aspect
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Sounds like ski towns.
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I don't think it's a mistake or a blunder on his part, I think it's an intentional choice. Either WaPo serves his needs as a billionaire-sympathetic mouthpiece or it shutters and that's one more free press thorn in his side gone; either way, he wins.
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PE is even putting their tentacles into law firms and accounting, there's no escape from these cretins
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oh neat, thanks for prompting me to look this up; and here I was thinking we had a straightforward ethical rule that would prevent this
www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/11/private-equity-investment-in-us-law-firms-current-models-and-recent-developments
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I still don't get how all the shit these guys do aren't massive conflicts of interest and violations of fiduciary duty.
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And Vets!
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believe me the law firm thing keeps me up at night
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It's literally the 'libertarians are housecats' joke on a systems level.
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Democracy isn't just for voting, politics and governance. it's for work and money as well.

One we we'll learn...[sigh].
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Today I learned more about Kessler Syndrome: When you put so many shotty satellites into the sky you risk a total clusterfuck cascade of them all slamming into each other, raining debris upon the earth and making space travel essentially impossible for centuries.
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People who do this should get egged in public at minimum. You shouldn’t be able to shrug off fuckups of this magnitude.
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we would be safe from this if we took away a large amount of their money
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This is even funnier when one remembers what killed the USFL in the 1980’s (it was rich businessman Donald Trump)
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i thought i knew who this was about and realized it can be about so many people oh my god
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This is Reagan
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He bought it to break it.
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Monied dilettantes, run amok
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I think he knows exactly what he's doing
I think this was his end game all along
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"clumsily destroys what made it good"

no. he's intentionally detroying it, just like bari wiese is destroying CBS. it's an INTENTIONAL move.

"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand"

no... he does. he understands that news and education always lead people to fight capital. he wants capital.
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until people can start actually blaming billionares for intentionally doing the things they do, this will never get fixed. your post is oopsy-washing bezos' INTENTIONAL destroying of the wapo.

it's a CLASS WAR.
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the saving grace is that it’s not done for ego or wanting to make a name, it’s cause they get a shit ton of money by gutting the company they just bought
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Dan Snyder checks in.
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greed for want of a better word sucks
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Sounds like half the franchises in major league sports.
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i think additionally its like. he thinks he's smarter than all THOSE rich dipshits and "waited until he already won" to gut his prize to be only the mouthpiece of regime. but he's too early!
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it’s just an “investment” to them. another big thing they can own amd rule over. “what it’s supposed to do” is irrelevant to a parasite
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Alternatively: it’s intentional and diabolical
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It's not even unique to newspapers. Massive Food Conglomerate Buys Beloved Local Brand, Ruins It is a tale almost as old as massive food conglomerates
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capitalism breeds machines that eat eachother until they get so big they can only eat themselves
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He wants to make it The MAGA Post!
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I'm really sick of trust fund babies failing up to the top, then thinking they have some divine insight into the world and just rot everything they touch, but have so much wealth setting it on fire every day still can't make a dent in their fortune.
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The CW around WaPo and CBS News has been rich guys stifling free press when it should be rich guys do the news equivalent of building the cybertruck in an industry with no margin for error
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I see this as more as a “catch and kill” scenario.
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Not only do they not understand the product, they often don’t even consume or enjoy the product.

This is the case in so many industries it’s staggering.
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I mean, he's destroying what's good in it *for us* because once they own the paper it's no longer an investment per se, but a tool. Its financial returns aren't what they're interested in, it's the paper's instrumentality as a propaganda outfit.
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They don't need to make a good paper that appeals to a lot of people. They need a bullhorn with the WaPo's skin to assure centrists and conservatives that they're correct and continue to pressure the Overton window to the right. Jeff Bezos doesn't care if subscriptions and ad rev are down.
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I don’t think it’s about him not understanding the industry so much as him not respecting it. He could easily have made WaPo the best newspaper in the nation, if that had been his goal.
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Is it really clumsy though? Seems to me he set out to destroy it
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MySpace whispers from beyond the grave …
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Couldn't be more accurate.
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We need to remember that Bezos has earned billions since he destroyed the WP. He wasn't interested in the paper as a financial asset, he bought it to control the flow of information.

There was nothing clumsy in his destruction of a leading news source. That was his intent.
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Oh, he knows exactly what he's doing. This is deliberate. He wants us ignorant, and the press gets in the way of that.
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they shoot horses, don't they!?!
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I dunno, I think this is pretty damned intentional sabotage. Not even because I don't believe he's that stupid; it's because it's so obvious he's killing the important bits first at the same time as he's kissing up to Trump with that dumbass "documentary".
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"Oh shit, this is popular and making money now, what if we strip it down to a skeleton and fill it with garbage to try and make all the money in existence ... oh no it's bankrupt. Time to move to the next thing" times infinity.
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Exact definition of a parasite
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It's applying the same "everything I do it good because I did it" essentialism to the brand and being shocked when people care about more than the name on the box
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Something that is dedicated to performing one function is better than something attempting to perform two functions. Where anything - a corporation, a house, a field of corn - attempts to fulfill the function of "generate value for shareholders", it, ironically, becomes less valuable.
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Bitcoin was a Russian PsyOp designed to make the stupidest and most degenerate morons on the Internet into powerful oligarchs and cause exactly this.

100,000 Mr Beasts.
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literally thought this was just about Elon and the international shitstorm of litigation being piled up on himself for the stupid shit he does
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Artists are seeing this happen with Adobe right now.
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Another reminder of the crucial importance of independent public media.
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I'm of the opinion that they are deliberately destroying these platforms to clear the deck for their power moves. Cripple cbs, twitter and wapo so we can take over. It's not clumsy - it's targeted.
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