Billionaire Jeff Bezos reportedly hit his breaking point with his chief executive at The Washington Post after he was seen strutting down a red carpet days after a bloodbath that eliminated nearly a third of the newsroom.
Will Lewis, the embattled CEO and publisher of the Post, announced Saturday that he was leaving the newsroom just two years after owner Bezos appointed him to revitalize the institution.
His hasty departure followed a viral video of a red-cheeked Lewis walking the red carpet at the NFL Honors ceremony in San Francisco on Thursday evening, one day after The Washington Post announced layoffs that cut roughly 300 journalists and gutted its sports department.
“Bezos lost patience after the Super Bowl thing,” one newsroom insider told the Financial Times.
Senior management at the Post was reportedly livid at Lewis, 56, for what insiders described as his “callous” attendance at the ceremony. Others told the Times that for Bezos, 62, it was “the last straw.”
Lewis had already reached a point of no return in the Washington Post newsroom after remaining silent on the day the cuts were announced, according to people familiar with the situation.
“There was no communication from him about buyouts,” one person told the Times. “He didn’t put out a statement. Senior editorial leadership was furious.”
Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch media veteran, did not attend Wednesday’s conference call informing staff of the cuts or publicly address the layoffs—a decision noted by former and current staffers online.
“Will Lewis was too busy to join the call to tell his staff he’s destroying the @washingtonpost sports department yesterday… but he did have time to walk the red carpet at NFL Honors here in San Francisco today. Amazing,” Nicki Jhabvala, a reporter for The Athletic and a former Washington Post journalist, wrote on X.
Publicly, Bezos took Lewis’s departure in a seemingly optimistic stride.“The Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity,” Bezos wrote in a statement on Saturday that did not name Lewis. “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” he added.
Jeff D’Onofrio, the Post’s chief financial officer, has been named as the interim chief executive of the paper.
Lewis, for his part, did not thank—or even mention—his staff in his curt resignation letter. He did, however, express gratitude to Bezos, who is reportedly worth more than $224 billion.
“I want to thank Jeff Bezos for his support and leadership throughout my tenure as CEO and Publisher,” Lewis wrote in a two-paragraph memo shared by Post reporter Matt Viser on X. “The institution could not have a better owner.”
Before his rocky tenure at the Post started in Jan. 2024, Lewis’s career in British media spanned decades, first at Murdoch’s Sunday Times, then as an editor at the Telegraph Group, where he earned the nickname “Thirsty Will” and developed a reputation for late-night karaoke with colleagues.
At the Post, Lewis presided over the exodus of hundreds of thousands of subscribers following the cutting of a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris, the resignation of top reporters and editors, and internal clashes over coverage of phone-hacking litigation tied to his time in the British press—disputes that preceded the abrupt resignation of former executive editor Sally Buzbee.
Lewis appears to have a history of prioritizing lavish titles and events over the newsroom. He oversaw Murdoch’s Dow Jones group, which includes the Wall Street Journal, but left to rush to the aid of fallen British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which later earned Lewis knighthood.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Washington Post for comment.
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