Why does Jeff Bezos still own the Washington Post?

300 journalists have lost their jobs at The Washington Post. Over 300,000 readers have canceled their subscriptions. Owner Jeff Bezos, who purchased the legendary publication in 2013, has driven his reputation into the ground by using his vast empire to churn out content designed to make President Donald Trump happy: Amazon MGM Studios spent $40 million to produce a fawning documentary about Melania Trump, which premiered days before the Post sent out mass layoff notices. And yet, he’s gotten nothing out of his attempts to suck up to Donald Trump — at least, nothing that’s a net positive to his bottom line.

Which begs the cynical question: Why does he even own The Washington Post at all?

The Trump era is, after all, a cynical and transactional time. Billionaires, CEOs, and world leaders have quickly learned that sucking up to Trump will get them what they want — pardons, tariff exemption, an export control lifted, a merger deal approved, an investigation quashed. And when it comes to media companies, the Paramount-Skydance merger has set the bar for sucking up to Trump. In order for the merger to get regulatory approval, Skydance CEO David Ellison pushed CBS to settle a defamation suit filed by Trump, canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and hired Bari Weiss, a right-wing Substacker with virtually no newsroom leadership experience, as CBS News’s editor-in-chief. In short, Ellison had to commit to neutering CBS’s ability to criticize Trump. But he did get a $28 billion merger out of it.

Bezos’ media plays, on the other hand, seem self-contradictory. Financing a fawning documentary about Melania Trump does not mesh with owning a media company with a 150-year-old legacy of holding politicians accountable, especially one that famously held Trump accountable during his first administration. (If the goal was to neuter the Post too, then bafflingly, his deputy, Will Lewis, fired everyone except for those on the political desks.) Even his attempt to separate the political opinions from the Post’s journalism, an attempt to have it both ways, backfired. After he announced that the opinion page would now reflect more conservative views, reporters began leaving the Post in droves, and subscriber numbers plummeted even further. As the Post’s former editor-in-chief Marty Baron put it in a column shortly after the layoffs, it was “near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

One could argue — as WaPo insiders have to media reporters — that the layoffs were necessary because the paper was losing money. But billionaires have plenty of face-saving ways to get an unprofitable media outlet off their hands, in a manner that does not include mass layoffs (or at least, offloads the layoffs onto its next owner). The Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, had been donated by its billionaire owner to a nonprofit, while Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes ended up selling The New Republic to Win McCormack after his own failed attempt to reshape the 100-year-old magazine. The Post, which had grown its digital audience throughout Bezos’ ownership, would have immediately attracted buyers: last year, tech journalist Kara Swisher announced that she and several investors were prepared to purchase the Post from Bezos, but reportedly never heard back from him.

Perhaps Bezos needs to suck up to Trump to further Amazon’s interests, which would make more sense if Bezos still ran the company. Except he doesn’t. He stepped down as CEO in 2021. Amazon, whose subsidiary AWS holds the lion’s share of federal government contracts, has been able to independently suck up to Trump via donations to the White House’s new ballroom fund. (Admittedly, Bezos’ government contracts with NASA are on the table, and he was reportedly spotted hanging out with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Blue Origin facility in Florida on the day of the Post layoffs.)

Maybe this pile of self-contradictions — or, as he once described his ownership of the Post, a “complexifier” — was inevitable when Trump came back into office and made it clear that he would punish the Big Tech entities that displeased him. But there’s no clear and logical explanation for why Bezos is going about his supplication: not one that makes financial sense, nor one that immediately furthers his own political standing with Trump, nor one that reaffirms the commitment he once made to protecting the First Amendment. And that lack of clarity only makes the Post’s decapitation even more senseless.