by Brad Stone
Bezos also had a few strange notions about how the journalism process might be streamlined. He wondered aloud whether the paper would need so many editors if it simply hired great writers. Baron responded that if anything, the paper probably needed more editors. Bezos repeated that refrain so often that a few editors took to sending him the raw copy of high-profile journalists. Amazon said Bezos never received or read any such emails, but he eventually came to agree with Baron.
Marty Baron recalled Bezos defying his expectations at every turn. For example, he assumed that Bezos would want to personalize the Post’s home page for every reader. But Bezos observed that readers came to the paper in part because they trusted the staff’s editorial judgment. Baron said that Bezos “didn’t try to reinvent the paper; he tried to capture what made it special.”
But Bezos did try to reinvent the systems behind the paper, with a flood of Amazon-style rituals. The Pancake Group, which occasionally expanded to include finance and audience development execs, spoke to Bezos every other week on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. EST for an hour. Bezos asked Post managers to “bring me new things”; he wanted to see everything, including changes in pricing and how to expand the paper’s audience and revenue, in the form of six-page Amazon-style narratives, subject to Bezos’s careful reading and detailed questions.
It was a Bezos-style repeatable process, or forcing function, designed to push his team to think creatively and innovate. Post execs said that Bezos read every memo beforehand save for once, when he apologized for not getting to it and took the time to read it quietly at the start of the meeting. He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how “data overrules hierarchy” and there are “multiple paths to yes”—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.
Bezos had only one conspicuous misstep, at least in the eyes of many current and former Post employees. In late 2014, acting on concerns that he had expressed during his due diligence before the acquisition, he froze the Post’s pension plans, cutting retirement benefits for longtime employees and converting newer employees’ plans to 401(k) retirement accounts with a relatively miserly matching grant from the company.
The pension had been on perfectly stable footing, thanks in part to the fund’s stake in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The changes nevertheless reduced the Post’s obligations toward its longest-serving employees and gave current employees less financial incentive to stay at the paper for their entire careers. Bezos’s scuttling of the pension fund, and a twin hostility to the Washington Post Guild, was in line with how he operated Amazon, as well as his long-standing aversion to unions and to lavishing employees with ostentatious perks. “The only explanation anyone ever got was that he doesn’t believe that a company has any obligation to its workers once they walk out the door,” said one Post writer. (Amazon said this does not accurately represent Bezos’s views.)
The move initiated a frosty relationship between Bezos and the guild. During the difficult negotiations every few years, a smattering of employees would protest the changes to their contracts in picket lines outside the Post’s offices. But they remained a vocal minority. Many Post employees were grateful for the paper’s revival and remained card-carrying members of the Church of Bezos. Only Donald Trump, lobbing Twitter grenades from afar, noticed the discord and tried to stir the pot:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Washington Post employees want to go on strike because Bezos isn’t paying them enough. I think a really long strike would be a great idea. Employees would get more money and we would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time! Is @WaPo a registered lobbyist?
* * *
Predictably, Bezos took the most interest in the Post’s products and technology. He forged a partnership with CIO Shailesh Prakash, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and boasted that the newspaper had better engineers than many Silicon Valley startups. He obsessed over shaving milliseconds from the time it took web pages and complex graphics to load. He also asked for customized metrics that could measure the reader’s true interest in stories, and whether an article was truly “riveting.”
When Bezos acquired the paper, Prakash had been developing a content system for the Post, called Arc Publishing, to manage functions like online publishing, blogging, podcasting, and advertising. Naturally, Bezos loved the idea of supplying that technology to other papers and encouraged Prakash to license it to broadcasters and any company that needed publishing software. By 2021, Arc powered fourteen hundred websites and was on a path to generating $100 million in annual revenue.
Bezos and Prakash’s team also spent eight months developing the magazine-like Rainbow app for tablets. This digital edition of the paper, updated twice daily, had no home page. It presented articles in a magazine-like layout and allowed users to scroll through a series of pages containing two articles each and then zoom into any story that interested them. Prakash described Bezos as “chief product officer” on the app; he recalled that the owner articulated an overarching goal of solving the problem of “cognitive news overload” by allowing readers to hover high above the day’s events, like a glider soaring through the sky. The Post released the app in July 2015 and made it standard on Amazon’s Fire tablet.
In Prakash, Bezos had found a kindred spirit. They agreed on everything—almost. When Apple (an Amazon rival) solicited the Post to join a bundle of publications in a new service called Apple News+, Prakash and other Pancake Group members saw the gaudy potential of 1.5 billion iPhones and iPads and wrote a six-page memo outlining the pros and cons of joining. But Bezos reasoned that it would undermine the Post’s identically priced subscription offering and argued against it passionately. The Post passed on the opportunity.
When the Wall Street Journal tried to poach Prakash to be their CTO in early 2017, Bezos persuaded him to stay—in part by endowing him with a separate role on the advisory board of his private space company, Blue Origin. On the occasional Saturday, Prakash would fly across the country to Kent, Washington, to help the company with its supply chain systems. “The most important thing Jeff has brought is a culture of experimentation,” Prakash said. “None of us feel that if we spend money and screw up some big project that we’re going to have to face an auditing committee. We are not afraid to fail.”
Bezos’s imprimatur did more than just allow the Post to take bigger risks. On the advertising side, the mere proximity of the world’s most famous businessperson seemed to cast an effervescent glow. A sales deck developed by the ad team screamed “the Bezos Effect” on its second page, next to a smiling headshot of the bald tech impresario. Post ad executives said that sponsors were drawn to the paper because of Bezos’s involvement, even if the execs did find themselves constantly explaining that no, Amazon did not own the paper. “The story is what helped us more than anything else,” said one business-side executive. “That is part of the magic of Jeff Bezos—that he is Jeff Bezos.”
The Post was now a private company, so it no longer released financial information. But between the years 2015 and 2018, according to an executive privy to the numbers, ad revenues jumped from $40 million to $140 million and digital subscribers rose by more than 300 percent, exceeding 1.5 million for the first time. (That number would reach 3 million by the time of Marty Baron’s retirement in January 2021.) While the paper had lost around $10 million in 2015, it made more than $100 million in the three years after that—a remarkable turnaround from the projected losses Bezos had rejected. “I can’t believe how fast this is happening,” he said to the Pancake Group after witnessing the extent of the turnaround.
Luck certainly played a role: the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump generated record levels of interest in political news. But Bezos, his management methods, and
his deference to the realities of a changing news business had also delivered a blast of strategic clarity to a 140-year-old institution.
* * *
A year after Bezos acquired the Post, its reporter in Tehran, Jason Rezaian, was imprisoned by the Iranian government and charged with espionage. Rezaian would spend the next eighteen months in jail, held often in solitary confinement in “the city I called home,” according to his 2019 memoir, Prisoner. Initially after his arrest, Post execs thought the detention would amount only to short-term harassment. As weeks stretched to months, they realized the situation was more dangerous and that Rezaian might be tried and executed by the country’s hard-line religious clerics.
In the U.S., Rezaian’s family, along with Marty Baron, Fred Ryan, and many other representatives of the Post, reached out to officials at every level of the U.S. government. When foreign leaders visited the capital, Ryan requested private meetings and asked them to exert their influence with the Iranian government on Rezaian’s behalf. From Seattle, Bezos asked for frequent updates and at one point briefly considered running a “Free Jason” advertisement in the 2015 Super Bowl. Later that year, when it appeared that the U.S. government had reached a complex and later controversial financial deal with the Iranian government that included freeing Rezaian and three other prisoners, Bezos wanted to fly over personally and bring him home.
So on January 21, 2016, Bezos flew his new $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet and met the recovering Rezaian and his family at the U.S. Army’s Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany. He had stocked the plane with streamers, #FreeJason signs, and burritos and beer, since prior to his captivity, Rezaian had told TV host Anthony Bourdain that it was the food he missed the most. They flew to Bangor, Maine, an accessible entry point with little air traffic, where despite Rezaian and his wife having parted with their passports and other identification during the ordeal, an ICE official ushered them in, saying that the Iranians needed to know “you screw with one of us, you screw with all of us.” Bezos then personally shuttled Rezaian and his wife to Florida for a brief respite in Key West.
A few days later, they were all back in D.C. having dinner with Post execs, and on January 28, they attended the ceremonial opening of the Post’s gleaming new headquarters on K Street, overlooking historic Franklin Square. The offices were state-of-the-art, with new workstations, and spots for developers and designers, who would now sit alongside journalists, as well as video studios so reporters could easily appear on cable TV. Rezaian spoke emotionally at the opening, and then Bezos, wearing a #FreeJason lapel pin, addressed employees. “Important institutions like the Post have an essence, they have a heart, they have a core—what Marty called a soul,” he said. “And if you wanted that to change, you’d be crazy. That’s part of what this place is. It’s part of what makes it so special.”
Bezos had saved the Post. But he was also, in a way, benefiting from the refracted glow of its noble journalistic mission. In 2016, Fortune magazine placed Bezos in the top spot on its list of the world’s 50 Greatest Leaders—above Angela Merkel, Pope Francis, and Tim Cook. The accompanying article spent as much space on the turnaround at the paper as it did on the momentum at Amazon. “We used to joke that Jeff changed retail completely, built a 10,000-year clock, and sent rockets into space. But he wasn’t called the greatest leader in the world until he helped a newspaper company,” a former Post executive told me.
Washington, D.C., seemed to appreciate Bezos, and he returned the sentiment. That fall, he paid $23 million for the largest home in the city, the former Textile Museum and an adjoining mansion in the fashionable Kalorama neighborhood; his new neighbors were Barack and Michelle Obama, along with Ivanka Trump, the daughter of his adversary, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Bezos would spend the next three years and $12 million renovating the 27,000-square-foot structure, with its eleven bedrooms and twenty-five bathrooms. He planned to spend more time in the city and use the residence to hold the kind of exalted dinner parties for the rich, powerful, and interesting that were once the hallmark of a previous owner, Katharine Graham.
“Now I get it,” Bezos had told Sally Quinn, widow to the Post’s celebrated former editor, Ben Bradlee, at Bradlee’s funeral. The Post wasn’t just a business to be reinvented with Amazonian principles and integrated into its ecosystem of Kindle devices and Prime membership. It was also a mission to be protected and a community where he was welcomed and even revered. And if an enemy of the institution attacked it—like, say, a candidate for the presidency of the U.S.—Bezos was going to throw caution to the wind and respond.
During the presidential campaign, Bezos asked the Pancake Group to come up with a unique national branding statement, something that would neatly encapsulate that mission. “If this was a club, would you want to join that club?” Fred Ryan recalled Bezos saying as he described what he wanted in the slogan. “If this was on a T-shirt, would you want to wear it?” Bezos offered a single suggestion—something he had heard in speeches by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who had read a version of the phrase long ago in an appellate court decision: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Post execs spent a year trying and failing to come up with something better. They hired outside branding agencies and then fired them in frustration. Finally, they gathered around a table and spent hours brainstorming. They wanted something optimistic and hopeful, but out of hundreds of ideas like “Freedom moves in light,” none were quite as poetic or resonant, particularly after Donald Trump’s shocking victory. So they ended up going with Bezos’s original suggestion, which they later put on a T-shirt and mailed to him.
Over the next few years, irritated by the Post’s penetrating coverage of his tumultuous administration, Trump would grow even more vindictive on Twitter toward Bezos and the paper. He threatened Amazon with onerous new regulations and attacked its relationship with the U.S. Postal Service. The paper’s reporting on human rights violations would also antagonize authoritarian governments in other countries around the world, from Russia to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In response, they would try to take out their ire on Amazon and its high-profile CEO. Bezos’s easy compartmentalization of all the swirling concerns from multiple entities in his growing business empire was swiftly proving untenable.
Bezos and his unique management practices and optimism about technology had been undeniably good for the newspaper. But in the end, owning the Washington Post would exact more of a toll on Amazon—and on Bezos himself—than he ever could have imagined.
CHAPTER 6 Bombing Hollywood
As reporters and editors at the Washington Post grappled with the surprising victory of Donald Trump in late 2016, publicists for Amazon’s television and film division were immersed in a much different challenge: how to conduct a buzz-generating campaign for its Oscar-worthy movie, Manchester by the Sea. The publicists were brainstorming when one had the idea of asking the boss himself whether he would consider hosting a party for the film in Los Angeles. They emailed him and later recalled getting an unusually speedy reply: “Yes! Let’s do it at my house.”
On Saturday evening, December 3, a cool, cloudless night, celebrities descended on Bezos’s twelve-thousand-square-foot Spanish-style estate in Beverly Hills, which he had purchased nine years earlier for $24 million. An extravagant tentlike structure was erected in the backyard, on a decoratively tiled outdoor patio near the swimming pool. One of the film’s producers, Matt Damon, and its star Casey Affleck held court, while actors, directors, and agents lined up at the well-stocked open bar.
Here was a substantial slice of Hollywood’s A-list, invited either because they worked with Amazon’s production arm, Amazon Studios, or were members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Michelle Williams (also in the film), Gael García Bernal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Andy Garcia, and Megan Mullally; the directors Joel Coen and Kenneth Lonergan (who directed and wrote Manchester); Hollywood legends Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, John Lithgow, and Ben Kingsley; the musicians T Bone B
urnett and Beck; Maria Shriver and her daughters; and many more.
In the middle of it all was Bezos, wearing a plain charcoal-gray suit with an open-collared white shirt—still, back then, the cautious choice of a reforming technology geek. MacKenzie did not attend. “Jeff is the opposite of me,” she had told Vogue magazine in a rare interview. “He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy.”
Indeed, Bezos was laughing and enjoying himself. The room was full of stars radiating high-powered wattage, but as the host and CEO of the company that had hired the event photographers, attention gravitated toward him. Among the many pictures snapped that evening, one would later be closely scrutinized and reprinted. Bezos was standing with Patrick Whitesell, the powerful executive chairman of entertainment and media agency Endeavor, and his wife, former television news anchor Lauren Sanchez, who stood comfortably between them.
Bezos’s minders tried to make sure he spoke to as many guests as possible. At one point, they had to interrupt his conversation with actress Kate Beckinsale and her plus-one, the skier Lindsey Vonn, who wore a striking cream-colored jumpsuit. Intermittently towering over him was his longtime deputy Jeff Blackburn, a six-foot-four-inch former college football player who oversaw Amazon’s streaming video business, Prime Video. Also by Bezos’s side but leaving early was Roy Price, head of Amazon Studios, who sported jeans and a black motorcycle jacket over a white V-neck T-shirt.
As an event designed to generate buzz and to amplify Amazon’s presence in Hollywood, the party worked magnificently. Trade publications carried multiple photographs and covered it like a high-society ball of yore. Bezos’s “intent this weekend was clear,” wrote the entertainment columnist Peter Bart in Deadline. “He wants a bigger presence in town for both himself and his company.”
