Posted by thm 5 hours ago
Fast forward and he's blocking the paper from endorsing presidential candidates (that alone lost 250k subscribers), he's reforming the opinion section to match the views of the current administration... and now he's just straight up destroying half of it. A lot has happened in his personal life too (divorced, remarried) and I'm curious what he'd actually say if he was to look back and reflect on the path taken. I wonder how reflective it is of the rich retreating into bubbles in the COVID era and never emerging from them. Alas, we probably won't ever know. There aren't many places left to report on it!
That's it, that's how he did it.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.
Everyone knows why he bought the Washington Post: it was for clout and prestige. Just like how the titans of industry built opera houses and libraries in centuries past. You aren't buying it to make a profit. You take care of something valued by society, and you win some respect from society. Conversely, if you burn that thing to the ground, society will hate you.
So why is the profitability of the Washington Post such a concern all of a sudden? Sure, they lost $100M in 2024, but Bezos didn't buy the Post to make money! And it's not like money is tight. Bezos is worth over $250B; in the last few days alone the jump in AMZN stock increased his net worth by over $5B. If he were to hand that $5B over to the Washington Post, they could keep on losing money at that rate for another half of a century! The article makes this exact point in the last few paragraphs.
If Bezos was genuinely concerned about alienating Trump or whatever, why not just sell the Post? Why try to undermine it like this? You are pissing off the people who like the Post, and I don't think the people who hate the Post are really going to care.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
That’s it.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.
> Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists
Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?
Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.
> How do you expect that to go?
Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better.
> Better than what we have now, hopefully.
We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse.
> I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right?
Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor.
Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason.
There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations.
In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.
This is just a power transfer to Wall Street and CEOs.
We live in a wealthy society. Folks will be wealthy. The problem isn’t the wealth per se but the distribution, in particular, the pain at the bottom; the channels between wealth and politics; and the connection between wealth and morality in fascistic-Christian circles.
But the biggest boon for society would be progressive taxes on inheritance. It wouldn’t be government’s problem to figure out how it would work. It would be on inheritor to figure out how to pay the taxes on their newly inherited wealth.
It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
I can’t think of a better policy suggestion for folks who have more than $100mm than this. Sort of like “corporate death penalty” mostly serves to distract from fines, “no more billionaires” conveniently distracts from e.g. adding tax brackets to pay for increasing the ones we have.
If that environment/framework has been unjust, how could you remedy it? A taking seems deeply problematic to me. That said, a renewal of our nation's antitrust laws might be a more effective and palatable approach.
The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.
Jokes aside, unless we go through major societal reforms (that would likely involve a lot of chaos) I don’t see this problem being fixed anytime soon.
If someone says a valued family heirloom of mine is worth $110M I would be forced to sell it?
You're allowed to keep $100M of it! That's seriously a lot of money!
Also the slogan is a Marxist alternative theory of wealth and power which conflicts with some basic premises of being interested in startups and is debunked in pg readings.
Bezos was able to purchase one of the nation's most important news outlets because he is a billionaire. If his wealth was capped at $100M, he would have had to pool resources with many other ultra-wealthy individuals to effect the same purchase. These people would have competing interests, and would also themselves be open to being bought out because their ownership stake in the company would be small. This would be good for the country, because one person being able to turn an important news outlet into his personal propaganda machine is bad, as the article describes.
What we are seeing is bezos trying to translate money into media power, which is real. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out that well. His paper is not that influential or distinct. He is unable to wield much control over the journalists likely because they operate within a tight culture that exists across outlets.
Your instinct is that media is actually real power. Isn’t a few people operating the media scarier than a few people being able to consume a lot?
But then why is media powerful? Public opinion is directly useful for winning elections. But also indirectly as public officials need to cater to the public.
Then $100k.
And then you live in Cuba.