WASHINGTON — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called the Washington Post his worst investment in a conversation with President Trump months before gutting the newsroom, according to a new book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.
“The people there are terrible,” Bezos told Trump over dinner in December 2024, according to an excerpt obtained by The Post ahead of the June 23 release of “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.“
“They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” Bezos said, focusing his ire at the business side of the publication after losing more than $100 million that year.
About two months after the dinner, Bezos ordered the Washington Post’s opinion pages to promote “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” — as subscribers peeled off in protest of the paper withholding its endorsement from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Bezos this February authorized the sweeping downsizing of the celebrated Watergate paper, eliminating roughly a third of its workforce, including all staff photographers and the sports section.
Bezos’ candor with Trump was described by Swan and Haberman as part of a larger effort by Big Tech titans to cozy up with the incoming president, who had spent his four years in political exile trashing what he viewed as bias by news outlets and major internet platforms.
Trump told Bezos “this Washington Post is really unfair. You’ve got to take better care,” the book says.
“Bezos commiserated with Trump over their December dinner, indicating that he, too, was deeply frustrated with the Post, though for a different reason.”
“In Trump’s telling, Bezos told him he had lost half his friends over the investment,” the authors write. “Bezos would tell others that wasn’t quite right: He hadn’t lost friends, but people close to him had urged him to sell the newspaper.”
Trump said in an interview for the book that he “hated” Bezos during his first term under the mistaken belief that the billionaire controlled what the newspaper wrote.
“He said they write stories about him. And I didn’t believe him the first time, first term. And I hated him for it,” Trump recalled. “And then I believed him.”
A Washington Post spokesperson declined to comment.
It’s unclear how Bezos currently views the Post. The paper’s former publisher and CEO, Will Lewis — whom Bezos paid a $3 million salary — was tossed out shortly after this year’s mass firings for partying at the Super Bowl, sparking a firestorm of criticism over the tone-deaf optics.
Before the large-scale downsizing, the Post had in January 2025 eliminated 4% of its staff focused on the advertising department.
Jeff D’Onofrio, who formerly worked at CafeMedia and Tumblr, has replaced Lewis in an acting capacity and said he is “going to fight like hell for this institution” and recently has approved new content and licensing deals to bring in revenue from OpenAI, Apple News+ and Alexa+.