A rival journalist has torched Jeff Bezos for ordering sweeping layoffs at the Washington Post as his own personal fortune soars into the hundreds of billions.
Veteran White House reporter Peter Baker, who worked for more than 20 years at the Washington Post before making the jump to the New York Times, railed against the cuts announced Wednesday, which eliminated around 800 journalists, or around a third of the newsroom.
“No struggling newspaper ever saved itself by becoming a worse and less essential product. But what’s happening today at the @washingtonpost is not just the latest devastating contraction of the news industry; it’s the gutting of an American institution vital for a healthy society,” the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent wrote on X.
The veteran White House reporter, who was the once outlet’s lead reporter covering former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, criticized the scope of the cuts, which eliminated the Post’s entire sports and book review sections while slashing local and international news coverage.
“For my money, the @washingtonpost sports section has been the best in the country, its foreign correspondents some of the bravest and most exceptional in the world, its metro coverage indispensable to a major region and its book section one of the first things I read on Sundays,” he continued.
In another post, Baker juxtaposed Bezos’ vast wealth with what the Post has said it has lost in the years since he purchased the newspaper in 2013.
“Bezos net worth in 2013: $25.2 billion. Net increase in Bezos wealth since buying the Post: $224.2 billion,” Baker wrote. “Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million.”
“Number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week: 5,” his post concluded.
Baker also hit Amazon’s $75 million investment into the production and marketing of the movie Melania, which saw abysmal ratings at the box office upon its release last weekend and made just a tenth of Amazon’s investment.
He reposted several social media posts criticizing the paper for cutting journalists while keeping leadership in place. This includes Will Lewis, who was tapped by Bezos in 2023 to be the newspaper’s publisher and has overseen the massive decline in readership and subscribers.
The Daily Beast reached out to the Washington Post for comment.
While Bezos had originally given the newspaper much funding when he first purchased it in 2013, his support for the Washington Post as a storied institution has diminished over the last decade.
His leadership outraged many longtime readers after the paper declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, sparking thousands of subscribers to flee the outlet.
Current and former journalists of the Washington Post have similarly expressed outrage over the cuts.
Jeff Stein, chief economics correspondent for the Post, called the layoffs “a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington, and the country as a whole. I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession.”
Baker’s publication, the New York Times, in their report on the layoffs, wrote that the cuts are “a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet.”
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