Til Jeff Do Us Part

Jeff Bezos
Personal liberties and free markets are the true tenets of American entrepreneurship, an art form that Bezos not only practiced but truly perfected. And while plenty of onlookers have likened Bezos’s renovations at the Post to Musk’s chainsawing of the federal bureaucracy, this facile comparison misses the point. Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
March 13, 2025

On Tuesday evening, an anonymous Daily Beast reporter cold-called Don Graham, the nearly 80-year-old former Washington Post publisher who sold his family’s distressed heirloom to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in 2013, and whose perspective on the most recent convulsions at the paper—Bezos’s “Free Markets, Free People’ opinion page mandate, the David Shipley and Ruth Marcus auto-defenestrations, the town’s lingering misgivings about Post C.E.O. Will Lewis—might therefore prove notable, perhaps even clicky. The Beast has been reliably melodramatic about Bezos’s renewed engagement at the Post—a recent headline, “Jeff Bezos Turns Washington Post Full MAGA to Fury of Reporters,” is illustrative—and here, too, they seemed to be spoiling for a fight, or at least some noteworthy contribution to the chorus of agonal screams from former Posties (Marty Baron, Cameron Barr, etcetera) who are now excoriating the paper’s benefactor.