In December 2024, just weeks after Donald Trump captured the White House for a second time and was preparing to launch a retribution campaign on his perceived enemies, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a private dinner with the incoming president.
As the two dined, Bezos delivered a startling message about the newspaper he owns. According to “Regime Change,” the forthcoming book from The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, a copy of which was obtained by Status, Bezos complained to Trump that The Washington Post was “the worst investment I’ve ever made.”
“The people there are terrible,” Bezos was quoted as telling Trump about the business side of the paper, lamenting the publication he bought in 2013 for $250 million. “They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen.”
Trump, who has long loathed the newspaper, responded with a complaint of his own. “This Washington Post is really unfair,” he told Bezos as the pair dined. “You’ve got to take better care.”
The remarks came just weeks after Bezos had plunged the newspaper into one of the most tumultuous periods in its modern history. In October, Bezos intervened to block The Post’s planned endorsement of Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris. The decision triggered a tsunami of subscriber cancellations and a high-profile talent exodus. Journalists publicly pleaded with Bezos to engage with the paper as it descended into crisis. Instead, the billionaire remained absent as staff morale cratered and the paper’s management slashed one third of its entire staff.
Behind the scenes, however, Bezos was apparently talking about the newspaper. Just not with the people who worked there.
According to Swan and Haberman, Bezos used his Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump to criticize the publication and its staff to the very man who had spent years denouncing it as “failing” and “the enemy of the people.” The conversation offers a rare look at how Bezos views the institution he sought to foster more than a decade ago but has since steadily undermined.
A Bezos spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The Post declined to comment.
The revelation, first reported in an excerpt published by the New York Post, landed like a bomb inside The Post newsroom, insiders told Status, where staffers were upset by Bezos’ disparaging remarks, though few were surprised. After all, Bezos has spent the last two years disappointing many of the journalists who work at the paper.
His complaints about The Post’s finances were also rich with irony. While Bezos was directly responsible for the subscriber exodus that followed the Harris endorsement debacle, he once proudly described Amazon as “famously unprofitable” in a BBC interview. And after his dinner with Trump, Bezos spent roughly $75 million on the “Melania” vanity project, helping resurrect the career of Trump pal Brett Ratner, losing tens of millions of dollars along the way. Even so, Bezos later described the effort as a “very wise business decision.”
Bezos also ordered The Post’s opinion section to embrace what he described as “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” a move widely interpreted as a political shift to the right in service of Trump. He then installed Adam O’Neal to oversee the section. Since then, the operation has poured resources into video programming that has failed to attract an audience. As Status has reported, some newsroom employees have privately described the effort as embarrassing.
Meanwhile, Bezos has continued to keep the newsroom at arm’s length. While he has periodically surfaced in Washington, staffers have repeatedly noted that he has not engaged with his own employees seeking clarity about his plans for the institution. And while Bezos hoped his grievances about The Post would earn him goodwill with Trump, Haberman and Swan reported that the president privately mocked Bezos, along with Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, as both men sought to ingratiate themselves with him after the election.
“You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys,” Trump told associates, according to the book. “I’ve got to show you.”
“Think of where these guys were in 2016,” Trump reportedly told Elon Musk. “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.”
“First-class groveling,” Musk replied, in a twist of the knife.
And the book offers a clear indication—what many had long suspected—for why Bezos had worked so hard to cultivate Trump. In July last year, Bezos met with the president in the Oval Office where he pitched opening up lucrative federal contracts to his space exploration firm Blue Origin in hopes of competing with Musk’s SpaceX. Trump told Bezos he would take the idea under consideration, but it ultimately went nowhere.
While Bezos may have believed he was currying favor with Trump, he ended up trashing his own newspaper to a president who was ridiculing him behind his back, earning little respect in return for the effort. It is a remarkable self-own for one of the world’s most powerful businessmen and media owners. In the end, for all the damage Bezos has inflicted on The Post, the person he humiliated most may be himself.
