MAGAfied tech tycoon Jeff Bezos faced a grilling from his own journalists over his efforts to cozy up to the second Trump administration.
The second richest man in the world hosted a team of Washington Post editors and reporters for lunch at his D.C. mansion Thursday, asking them to leave their phones outside in an apparent effort to keep details of the meeting under wraps.
Several people with knowledge of the conversations told Status that the billionaire Amazon founder fielded furious questions from the invited journalists on everything from the tens of millions he poured into a critically panned documentary about the first lady to his bone-deep cuts at the storied newspaper, which President Donald Trump has long regarded as an adversary.
“One staffer asked Bezos pointedly whether Amazon’s involvement with Melania Trump’s documentary was an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration,” Status writes. “Bezos denied that assertion, growing defensive and insisting that it was a ‘hands-off’ deal that he wasn’t involved in personally.”
Bezos told staff the documentary still stands to yield returns on his $75 million investment. The Melania movie, which reviews describe as “a cheeseball of staggering inertia” and a “ghastly bit of propaganda,” performed poorly at the box office and has a critics’ rating of just 11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. MAGA fans appear to have driven its audience rating on the same site up to 98 percent.
The Hollywood director responsible for the movie is Brett Ratner, who was behind one of President Trump’s favorite film franchises, Rush Hour. Ratner’s career has otherwise been largely derailed by multiple allegations of sexual assault. Like Trump, he also featured in recent documents released by the Justice Department connected with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Bezos, once a Democratic Party mega-donor, has faced intense public and private backlash over his newfound support for the second MAGA administration. The Washington Post’s opinion desk has suffered a series of humiliating, high-profile departures, with at least six veteran journalists, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, leaving over what they decry as a major rightward shift in the publication’s ideological leanings.
Those departures were followed by hundreds of layoffs at WaPo last month, including journalists who received notice of termination while reporting from active war zones. Bezos is thought to have been “MIA” in the weeks leading up to the cuts, even as staff pleaded with him to intervene. The job losses were apparently the subject of intense discussion at Thursday’s private meet. “This isn’t sitting well with anybody,” one staffer is understood to have said.
“While Bezos reiterated his support for The Post’s future, he stressed that the paper’s business strategy must be driven by data, something that he said in a statement shortly after Will Lewis was ousted as chief executive and publisher last month,” Status reports.
The billionaire had appointed Lewis as publisher and CEO at WaPo in 2023. Staff have repeatedly lambasted him for an apparently chaotic management style, marred by routine absences from the office and interference in newsroom coverage and management, which former executive editor Martin Baron called “self-inflicted brand destruction.”
Management at the newspaper are now reconsidering the scope of the layoffs, reaching out to at least 10 previously fired journalists “to gauge their interest in returning to the paper in new roles,” Status reports. “The whiplash nature of the effort, that appears to represent a tacit acknowledgement that the initial cuts might have gone too deep, has left staffers perplexed.”
