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My impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner.

If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well.

However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem.

It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.

by mc325 hours ago|

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Few if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.

by UncleMeat3 hours ago|

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Then Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump.

"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.

by mc323 hours ago|

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Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.

He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.