The Washington Post has been bleeding money, readers, and credibility for years.
Now, a new book is about to blow the lid off what Jeff Bezos really thinks about the paper he owns.
And what Bezos reportedly told Donald Trump at a private dinner will leave the Post’s staff absolutely stunned.
Bezos Privately Torched His Own Newspaper to Trump
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told then-President-elect Donald Trump at a December 2024 dinner that The Washington Post was his “worst investment” — months before he authorized sweeping staff cuts at the newspaper, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.
“The people there are terrible,” Bezos told Trump over dinner. “They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” he said, focusing his frustration on the business side of the publication after losing more than $100 million that year.
Think about that for a second. The richest man on the planet, sitting across from the President-elect of the United States, privately calling his own staff terrible. That’s not a minor gripe — that’s a man who has completely lost faith in what he owns.
The claim appears in “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” which details interactions between Trump and some of America’s most influential business leaders during the presidential transition. The book is set for release on June 23, 2026.
Swan and Haberman wrote that “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. Bezos would later tell others that was not quite right — he had not lost friends, but people close to him had urged him to sell the newspaper.
Trump Admits He Once Blamed Bezos for the Coverage
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 said. “And then I believed him.”
That’s a remarkable admission — and a telling one. For years the mainstream press insisted Trump was just attacking the free press out of vanity or pettiness. But here is the owner of the Washington Post himself, privately telling Trump the same thing Trump had been saying publicly: the people running the paper were out of control and not listening to anyone.
Trump reportedly told Bezos, “this Washington Post is really unfair. You’ve got to take better care,” according to the book.
The Cuts That Followed Were Brutal
In February 2026, Bezos ordered the elimination of roughly one-third of the newspaper’s workforce, cutting the sports section, all staff photographers, and several foreign bureaus.
The Post did not disclose the number of jobs being eliminated, but The New York Times reported approximately 300 of its 800 journalists were laid off. The paper’s entire Middle East roster was let go, as was its Kyiv-based Ukraine correspondent.
Publisher and CEO Will Lewis abruptly stepped down just days after the newspaper laid off one-third of its staff. Neither Lewis nor Bezos participated in the meeting with staff members announcing the layoffs. Two of the most powerful people at the organization could not be bothered to show up and face the people they were firing.
Martin Baron, the Post’s first editor under Bezos, condemned his former boss for attempting to curry favor with President Donald Trump and called what has happened at the newspaper “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
The Collapse Did Not Start With the Layoffs
The Post’s troubles go back further than this winter’s bloodbath. The December dinner came after the Post withheld an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, a decision that prompted subscriber cancellations and internal backlash.
More than 200,000 people canceled their digital subscriptions in the days following that decision. Not all cancellations take effect immediately, but the figure represented about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of roughly 2.5 million subscribers.
Bezos defended the non-endorsement move in an October 2024 opinion piece, saying presidential endorsements hurt media credibility. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote.
And yet the readers did not buy it. The paper lost roughly $100 million in 2024 and $77 million in 2023. Subscribers were already walking out the door before the layoffs ever happened.
Following the cuts, Bezos also announced that the opinion pages would focus on promoting “personal liberties and free markets,” a departure from the far-left bent of the publication. Whether that reorientation comes too late to matter is a fair question.
What It All Means
The mainstream media spent the better part of a decade insisting that Donald Trump’s criticisms of the Washington Post were authoritarian attacks on a free press. Turns out the paper’s own owner was privately telling Trump the staff was terrible and the whole thing was a disaster.
That is worth sitting with for a moment.
The Post spent years positioning itself as the noble resistance — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” splashed across the top of every page — while hemorrhaging money, losing readers, and apparently frustrating the billionaire who signed the checks. The staff that lectured the country about accountability journalism was, according to its own owner, not listening to anyone and not producing results worth the investment.
There is a reason trust in the corporate press is at historic lows. People can sense when an institution is performing a role rather than doing a job. The Washington Post performed that role loudly for a long time. Now it is cutting a third of its workforce, its publisher is gone, and the man who owns it reportedly told the President of the United States it was the worst money he ever spent.
That is not a crisis that started this year. It built over years of ideological groupthink, editorial arrogance, and a newsroom that apparently believed its own press clippings more than it believed in serving readers. The bill has finally come due.
Sources: Fox News; “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman (Simon & Schuster, June 23, 2026); The California Post (excerpt); CNN; PBS NewsHour/Associated Press; NPR; The New York Times