BILLIONAIRE WINGNUTS EXPECTED MEDIA OWNERSHIP TO BE EASIER

So this just happened:

The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Here's one response to the news:

Everybody has it backwards. Billionaires aren’t buying up these institutions to make money. They’re buying them to kill them. Same as the oligarchs destroying government and social programs and things like weather forecasting and regulatory bodies. They’re creating a world they control completely

— Jared Yates Sexton (@jysexton.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 10:47 AM

The Washington Post and CBS aren’t intended to succeed. They’re intended to fail and as they fail any sort of power or influence they have over public opinion will demonstrably wane until it disappears. It’ll happen over and over again until there are no impediments for the wealthy.

— Jared Yates Sexton (@jysexton.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 10:50 AM

I don't agree. Look at Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter/X: He hasn't managed to make it profitable, but he's converted it into his version of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent -- a conduit for his racist and far-right views and the far-right and racist views of his favorite tweeters. He doesn't want "any sort of power or influence" X has to "demonstrably wane until it disappears." He wants touse X to help elect neo-fascists in the U.S., Britain, Germany, and elsewhere.

The Ellison family clearly could have hired someone much more low-profile than Bari Weiss if they wanted to destroy CBS News. They clearly plan to let her make significant changes -- sure, there'll be layoffs, but they're letting her bring in (semi-)boldface names and introduce new features at CBS.

And Jeff Bezos seemed to be trying to preserve The Washington Post after he purchased it in 2013. He hired an acclaimed editor, Marty Baron, and put some resources into the paper. More recently, though, he's tried to make it both leaner and Trumpier. Now he seems to be stripping it for parts, but I don't think that was the original intention.

Tech guys become impatient when everything they touch doesn't instantly turn to gold. They expect that they can move fast, break things, and watch the value of their new toy go up because they've made it buzzy. But that's not how mature businesses work. Even Twitter was a semi-mature business when Musk bought it. Musk couldn't accept that Twitter was never likely to be profitable, and Bezos doesn't seem to have understood how hard it would be for him to build an economically thriving newspaper.

Also, these guys wanted to see their increasingly right-leaning views reflected in the content produced by these properties. They can't accept the reality that this alienates large portions of their potential market.

I'm a genius! they tell themselves. So why is this so hard?

I don't think these guys are looking to destroy what they've purchased -- but they're all doing such a terrible job of building an appealing product that I can understand why it looks that way.