Bezos was always seen as a somewhat distant owner. Amazon’s holdings now include Whole Foods, Zappos, the streaming site Twitch, and M-G-M Studios. Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company, is a direct competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the race to privatize space travel. “He was sort of like a helicopter parent,” a former longtime employee at one of Bezos’s businesses told me, “giving a lot of direction on a Wednesday and then leaving us to pick up the pieces.” Still, no one seemed to know what his current vision for the Post might be. “In some ways, this is all a story about Jeff and how he changed over the course of his ownership and really became a different person with huge implications for the institution,” one former top editor told me. A journalist who knows Bezos said, “He’s on an intellectual journey. Wherever he lands, he’s thinking. Whatever it is, it’s a mind at work.”
At the end of 2012, Don Graham and his niece Katharine Weymouth, then the Post’s publisher, met at the Bombay Club, a restaurant near the White House that was especially popular during the Clinton era, to discuss the paper’s finances. The Post was entering its seventh year of declining revenue, and, for the first time, they were considering the possibility of selling. “We asked ourselves if we thought our small public company was still the best place for the newspaper,” Graham said at the time.
The Post had been in the family since 1933, when Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, bought it at auction. The Grahams, like the Sulzberger family, which has owned the New York Times for more than a century, viewed the paper not just as a business but as a civic trust. Don and his mother were fixtures in the Post’s headquarters on Fifteenth Street; Don seemed to know everyone’s name—reporters, receptionists, custodians. For years, the Post was a thriving regional monopoly, servicing one of the country’s wealthiest and most educated metropolitan areas.
The emergence of the internet threatened all that. In August, 1992, Kaiser, the managing editor, returned from a conference in Japan and wrote a memo to the paper’s leadership about the coming upheaval. “The Post is not in a pot of water, and we’re smarter than the average frog,” he said. “But we do find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured—or ignored as an unnecessary anachronism.” Within a decade, Craigslist had decimated the industry’s classified-ad revenues. In 2003, another Post managing editor, Steve Coll, proposed a plan to reconfigure the newsroom to adapt to the internet and use the paper’s name recognition to become more national in scope. Don Graham rejected the idea, saying that he wanted to maintain the paper’s local identity. Its strategy eventually became “For and about Washington.”