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Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos speaks onstage ahead of US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 2, 2026. (Photo by Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Jeff Bezos launched Amazon back in the mid-1990s, and by the time his company reached the 13-year mark it had already survived the dot-com bust, become an online retail juggernaut, and seen the launch of Amazon\u2019s Prime membership subscription program. By that point, around 2007, Bezos had also placed two of the most important bets in his company\u2019s history: 2006 saw the introduction of Amazon Web Services, which would become the backbone for a large chunk of the Internet, while 2007 brought the unveiling of Amazon\u2019s popular e-reader, the Kindle.<\/p>\n
Contrast that with how things have unfolded at The Washington Post<\/a>, now that it\u2019s been 13 years since Bezos bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million.<\/p>\n Amazon-style innovation stil missing at The Washington Post<\/p>\n In many respects, the nearly 150-year-old paper<\/a> is the least complicated of its billionaire owner\u2019s many business interests, which include a global e-commerce empire, the private space company Blue Origin, and a portfolio of investments that span logistics, media, and technology. And yet, 13 years into Bezos\u2019 ownership, the Post has seen no obvious equivalent to Amazon\u2019s Prime, Kindle, or AWS moments\u2014no big strategic moves or structural reinvention of the sort that he engineered so relentlessly at Amazon.<\/p>\n And based on his own words, he knows the newspaper needs that kind of risk-taking.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think you can keep shrinking the business,\u201d Bezos said in September 2013, during his first staff meeting<\/a> at the Post shortly after buying it. \u201cYou can be profitable and shrinking. And that\u2019s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, despite being a far less complex operation than Amazon or Blue Origin\u2014a newspaper being largely built around hiring journalists to create content and then monetizing that work through a revenue mix that includes advertising and subscriptions\u2014the Post days ago saw more than 300 employees join the ranks of the newly unemployed (and, for some, the newly Substacked<\/a>).<\/p>\n The layoffs<\/a> on Feb. 4 included shuttering entire sections of the paper like the Books section, plus making deep Metro cuts. The cuts were so far-reaching that they included an entire team of reporters covering the Middle East, as well as a Ukraine correspondent\u2014not to mention the Post\u2019s own Amazon beat reporter.<\/p>\n Demonstrators attend the Save the Post rally outside The Washington Post offices on Thursday, February 5, 2026, after about 300 newsroom employees were laid off.<\/p>\n CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images<\/p>\n Coverage of the paper\u2019s dramatic one-day contraction, by the way, has correctly noted that it shrunk the newsroom by 30%, but stepping back from this week also reveals an even deeper erosion. Bezos\u2014whose net worth when he bought the Post was about $25 billion, a figure that\u2019s since climbed to $224 billion as of this month\u2014has actually seen the Post newsroom shrink by 50% since 2023.<\/p>\n The paper had more than 1,000 newsroom employees three years ago. It\u2019s down to around 500 or so today.<\/p>\n In a memo to staff, Post executive editor Matt Murray framed the layoffs as a response in part to external forces, such as the fact that \u201cplatforms like Search that shaped the previous era of digital news \u2026 are in serious decline. Our organic search has fallen by nearly half in the last three years.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bezos playbook<\/p>\n Part of what\u2019s so surprising here is that it\u2019s happening at all, given who Bezos is.<\/p>\n Anticipating the decline of once-dominant platforms and building something new in their place is precisely what defined his career at Amazon. He doesn\u2019t even necessarily need to invent a new playbook for the Post\u2014he already wrote one at Amazon, and many of his insights there were already evident by the same point in Amazon\u2019s life cycle that he\u2019s now reached at the Post. Some of the most fundamental include:<\/p>\n Customer obsession. At Amazon, there was never much mystery about who the customer was or what they wanted\u2014things like low prices, fast delivery, abundant choice, and a shopping experience that didn\u2019t get in the way.<\/p>\n At the Post, the equivalent question still feels \u2026 kind of unresolved. The newsroom keeps shrinking and sections vanishing, with little evidence of a compelling vision taking their place. That point was underscored this weekend by the sudden exit of WaPo publisher Will Lewis<\/a>, which only deepens questions about where the paper might be headed.<\/p>\n