(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos griped to President Donald Trump about having made a bad investment in his 2013 purchase of the Washington Post, saying “The people there are terrible,” according to a new book by two reporters from the rival New York Times.
Jeff Bezos said buying the Post was his single worst investment and that the paper is filled with "terrible" people. https://t.co/JApaOas1HX Musk succeeded at X after first jettisoning most of the Twitter crew. It is hard to change a culture without removing the cultural warriors
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 18, 2026
Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman were slated to release their latest Trump-bashing book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, on Tuesday.
According to the early teasers, the reporters also will aim to push the socialist narrative that Donald Trump is colluding with big-tech oligarchs like Bezos, despite their having long opposed him in every way possible.
Following his landslide 2024 victory, Trump made peace with former Silicon Valley antagonists and even invited several of them to his inauguration.
The new book recounts a purported dinner that Bezos and Trump shared in December 2024, before his return to office but after the election.
“They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” Bezos said of the WaPo staff in an excerpt obtained by yet another rival, the New York Post.
Faced with humiliation over an endorsement of Trump’s presidential rival, Kamala Harris, Bezos issued a directive in late October 2024 saying that the paper — with a long history of blindly backing Democratic candidates — forgo its usual routine.
At the same time, he signaled his desire that the paper should hire more conservative writers to balance out its notorious bias, although it is unclear whether the newsroom heeded him in that regard.
Bezos’s public comments were largely considered to be a business decision as the storied institution that led the propaganda push for the CIA’s Watergate hoax continued to hemorrhage its bottom-line profits while shedding credibility with reckless abandon.
Yet, despite concerns about its long-term sustainability with readership declining, the far-left newsroom revolted over all the Amazon founder’s overtures to get it to tone down its TDS.
In June 2024, internal protests from the newsroom forced newly hired editor Robert Winnett, a British import and editor of the Daily Telegraph, to back out.
Undeterred, Bezos continued to press for changes that would make his $250 million investment more profitable.
Just before Trump’s second inauguration, the Post revealed plans to abandon the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan that it had rolled out in response to Trump’s first election.
Nonetheless, a year later, in February 2026, it revealed plans to cut a third of its staff, including major reductions to its sports staff, foreign bureaus and book coverage.
“We can’t be everything to everyone,” lamented executive editor Matt Murray.
Shortly thereafter, Post publisher Will Lewis — who had been brought on in 2024 to help turn the newsroom around — announced his departure. It is unclear whether Lewis left of his own accord, but the news of it led to another barrage of Bezos-bashing from disgruntled ex-employees.
Former editor Martin Baron called the Post’s decline “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
According to the forthcoming book, Bezos’s criticisms were part of a broader effort to distance himself from the paper and its politics, reassuring Trump that he had never sought to antagonize him in his first term, when the Post took a lead role in propagating the Obama administration’s Russia-collusion hoax and other dishonest narratives to undermine his presidency.
Trump himself revealed in an interview for the book that Bezos also felt antagonized by the Post, which somehow felt at liberty to deride their top boss in print.
“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 is quoted as saying. “And then I believed him.”
Bezos also lamented that his purchase of the Post resulted in his social alienation, with many of his friends encouraging him to sell it.
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
