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Jeff Bezos has reportedly made a brutal assessment of employees at The Washington Post, allegedly telling President Donald Trump that staff at the newspaper were ‘terrible’.
This comes as an upcoming book by journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman is due to be released, which claims to reveal private conversations the Amazon founder had with the US leader.
The book is titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, and details comments reportedly made by Bezos during a private dinner back in December 2024 and, if accurate, the conversation took place just weeks before significant job cuts were made at the newspaper, which Bezos purchased back in 2013.
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During the conversation with Trump, Bezos allegedly said: “The people there are terrible. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen.”
The Washington Post has faced financial difficulties in recent years, with reports indicating that the publication lost a whopping $100 million during 2024.
Its billionaire owner has previously pointed to those losses as a key reason behind restructuring efforts and workforce reductions, however, the new book suggests the situation may have been more personal motives behind the move.
According to Swan and Haberman, Bezos claimed the investment had cost him relationships with people in his social circle. However, he later disputed this claim.
Speaking to the California Post, the authors explained: “In Trump’s telling, Bezos told him he had lost half his friends over the investment. Bezos would tell others that wasn’t quite right: He hadn’t lost friends, but people close to him had urged him to sell the newspaper.”
The book is due to be released on Tuesday (June 23).
In other news, Bezos’ own employees at Amazon have been sharing brutal Slack messages roasting their boss’ AI leak.
This is according to 404 Media, which reported that disgruntled Amazon employees have been mocking the company’s AI use in a Slack channel that is dubbed #actual-aws-memes.
Calling out Amazon’s AI tools for producing ‘slop’, the channel has become inundated with memes.
The posting of these memes is said to have started around the end of 2024, a time ‘when [AI] adoption started to get really forced by leadership’.
One anonymous employee explained: “I think people meme about anything they’re around a lot, and obviously AI is a common topic. Of course it does not help that leadership is definitely pushing AI so there’s probably some element of backlash.”
