Jeff Bezos’s plans for Washington hit trouble

Three years after Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250mn, the Amazon billionaire made another Washington acquisition that was arguably just as significant to the Georgetown social set: a mansion in the capital’s upscale Kalorama Heights neighbourhood for $23mn.

His 2016 purchase of a former textile museum that would become the city’s largest private residence was celebrated locally as a sign the tech titan and his then-wife MacKenzie were shifting their lives from Seattle — where the couple had a love/hate relationship with city grandees — to “the other Washington”.

Bezos did little to discourage the speculation. Just as he set out on a $12mn renovation of the house in 2018, Amazon announced it was building a second headquarters in the Washington suburb of Crystal City. Then it became known that he wanted to acquire the city’s fabled National Football League team, which would soon change its name from the Redskins to the Commanders.

The capital embraced its new arrival. “What he’s going to do is revive the legacy of Kay Graham and her great socialising,” Jean Case, a Bezos friend and wife of AOL co-founder Steve Case, predicted that year in a reference to the late, legendary Post proprietor and Georgetown hostess.

When Bezos threw his first big party at the Kalorama property in January 2020, the guests included Mitt Romney and Ivanka Trump and the Post, where digital subscriptions and staffing were surging, looked like a rare news industry growth story. Soon afterwards, its proprietor began building his $10bn Bezos Earth Fund philanthropy organisation in Washington too.

But over the past 18 months, several of Bezos’s big Washington bets have been derailed, blocked or overtaken by events — culminating in the upheaval at the Post, where the billionaire’s handpicked chief executive, Sir Will Lewis, is facing a newsroom revolt triggered by his radical attempts to stem losses at the news organisation, which last year hit $77mn.

Robert Winnett, the British former colleague Lewis picked as editor, withdrew from the job last week, after stories appeared in rival outlets and the Post itself questioning both men’s ethics in previous roles.

The series of setbacks has raised a question in the nation’s capital: is Bezos still as enamoured with Washington — and the Post — as he was when he acquired the struggling newspaper a decade ago?

People who have spoken to Bezos insist he is still committed to the Post for the long term, a sentiment he reiterated in a memo to top editors last week in which he signalled he would “lead this great institution into the future”.

“In my experience, Jeff is a tough guy and I don’t think he cares that much what people think,” said a person who has worked closely with him in the past. “Will he tolerate losing $100mn every year? Absolutely not. Is he willing to give Will a chance to enact his strategy? I’m confident he will, barring new negative revelations.”

Still, a review of Bezos’s recent activities tells a slightly different story about the priorities of the tech billionaire and his new partner, TV personality Lauren Sánchez, one in which other hubs are vying with Washington for their business and social pursuits.

Flight logs provided by JetSpy for three private jets associated with Bezos do not capture all of the couple’s recent trips to Washington, where they hosted an awards gala in March and attended a state dinner at the White House in April. But they suggest that the city has ranked below Seattle, California, Florida and Texas on their list of destinations since early 2021.

When the Post was celebrating its three Pulitzer Prizes in May, the couple were attending the glittering Met Gala in Manhattan. Bezos arrived there following a similarly celebrity-heavy Formula One Grand Prix party in Miami. And, as last week’s leadership crisis convulsed the Post, they were photographed on holiday in Mykonos.

Days after Lewis shocked Post journalists this month by announcing the resignation of editor Sally Buzbee, Bezos paid $87mn for a third waterfront property in Miami, a 10,000 sq ft mansion on two acres with seven bedrooms, a pool and boat dock.

His move to south Florida followed an announcement by Amazon last year that it was halting construction on its Crystal City headquarters. Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice-president for worldwide economic development, insisted that “our long-term commitment remains unchanged” but acknowledged there was no update on when construction would resume.

Amazon had promised to create 25,000 jobs at the site, which sits next to Washington’s Reagan National Airport and just across the Potomac river from the capital’s monuments and museums.

But recent data from Virginia’s state development authority shows that the number of Amazon employees in the region actually fell from 8,430 last year to 7,791. The Post was the first to report the drop. Amazon, which like other big tech groups has grappled with how much post-pandemic office space it still needs, told the Financial Times that approximately 8,000 employees were assigned to the HQ2 site and more than 1,000 roles were open. 

Of all Bezos’s thwarted Washington initiatives, however, the one that may hit closest to home is his failed pursuit of the Commanders. A life-long NFL fan, Bezos had repeatedly signalled his wish to enter the elite club of football team owners.

Bezos went so far as to put an ownership group together with music mogul Jay-Z to acquire the Commanders, but was outbid by fellow billionaire Josh Harris, co-founder of the private equity firm Apollo.

At the time, some US media outlets reported that the team’s then owner, Dan Snyder, blocked Bezos’s bid because of his ownership of the Post — which almost single-handedly forced Snyder to sell, after it revealed the team allegedly tolerated pervasive sexual harassment and employee abuse.

People briefed on the process, however, insist Bezos was simply outbid by Harris, who acquired the team for $6bn. “I don’t think Snyder would have not sold to them if Jeff came in with a bid of $7bn,” said a person involved in the process.

There are few signs that Bezos is souring on the Post, the original pillar of his Washington empire, or Lewis, the leader he chose to transform it.

When the group searched for a new chief executive and publisher last year, Bezos relied heavily on longtime friend and Amazon board member Patty Stonesifer, who served as the Post’s interim chief, to sift through the candidates. The Post hired the Sucherman advisory firm to help with the process and did a “thorough background check” on Lewis and his past, according to people briefed on the matter. But Bezos himself is reported to have made the final decision to hire Lewis over a meal with the British media executive.

People familiar with the matter say Bezos and Lewis have had — at least until now — a good relationship, and that Bezos has endorsed Lewis’s turnaround plan for the Post, which has lost nearly half of its audience since 2020.

Bezos had moved in “lockstep” with the moves made by Lewis so far, according to a person familiar with their relationship, who said that the Amazon founder approved his new CEO’s decisions before they were announced. This included the plan for a “three-newsroom” structure, they added, which led to Buzbee’s departure.

But Bezos has been unemotional in separating from executives he has cooled on in the past. In 2014, when he decided to fire Katharine Weymouth as publisher of the Post, he moved quickly. Less than a year after buying the newspaper, he ousted the heiress to the Graham family that had controlled the paper for eight decades in a single meeting that lasted less than five minutes.

“I was struck by the abrupt and icy dismissal,” Martin Baron, executive editor at the time, wrote in a recent book. Weymouth later said: “I just was expecting to at least finish this year”. 

Additional reporting by Daniel Thomas and James Fontanella-Khan