Jeff Bezos is no longer relentlessly focused on customer satisfaction
The man who only believes in capitalism managed to do capitalism wrong.
The fallout from the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris at The Washington Post is here: more than 200,000 canceled subscriptions, NPR reports. This is about 8 percent of the paid subscriber base, and the number of cancellations is still growing.
To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. Like, I am actually flabbergasted: that’s fifty times as many cancellations in one weekend as The Post earned in the better part of a year.
“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.”
Now, there have been multiple reports at this point — from NPR, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post itself — that the call to stop endorsing candidates came from Jeff Bezos himself. The same day as Lewis’s bizarre announcement of The Post’s non-endorsement, executives from Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, met with presidential candidate Donald Trump.
I suppose I should mention the various government contracts Bezos’s other businesses have — among them, Amazon’s $10 billion NSA contract and Blue Origin’s $3.4 billion NASA contract. Trump has previously targeted Bezos for The Washington Post’s reporting. A columnist who quit the Post over the decision, Robert Kagan, told CNN, “This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.” Kagan pointed to the business contracts as motivation.