Graham and Bezos met to discuss a sale at the Sun Valley Conference, an annual retreat in Idaho that is popularly known as a “summer camp for billionaires.” Graham emphasized that owning a newspaper came with a particular set of challenges. Bezos’s businesses could be hurt by association; the paper’s journalists would likely report on him. But for Bezos, who had made his fortune in part by siphoning revenue from local bookstores, buying the Post seemed like an act of redemption. Baron told me that Bezos, the adopted son of a Cuban immigrant, felt a sincere commitment to the paper’s mission. “I think Bezos fundamentally believes in the country and believes in democracy and thought it was an important institution,” he said. Ultimately, Bezos purchased the paper for two hundred and fifty million dollars.

Many Post staff members were initially skeptical of the new owner. “The case against Jeff Bezos,” Ezra Klein wrote on the Post’s Wonkblog, was that “Amazon’s political interests extend across everything from state sales taxes to the minimum wage to trade with China.” Bezos wrote a letter that was published in the paper, seeking to reassure readers and his new employees alike of his good intentions. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he said. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”

Baron, who had edited the Boston Globe during its “Spotlight” investigation into the Catholic Church’s child-sexual-abuse coverup, ran the newsroom. Fred Hiatt led the paper’s Opinions section, a position he’d held for more than two decades. Hiatt was widely admired for, as one colleague put it, “an unassuming nature coupled with an unassailable intellect.” His section was center left on domestic issues and tilted more to the right on foreign affairs; Bezos, according to a Post report at the time, had said that “his political views were already in line with those of The Post’s editorial page.” Members of the newsroom researched Bezos’s past political contributions and found that he and Scott had donated to a gay-rights group in the state of Washington. “So people sort of took him to be a liberal with a libertarian streak,” Cameron Barr, a former senior managing editor, told me.

During Bezos’s first year as owner, he was heavily involved in the development of a tablet app for the paper, which the company called Project Rainbow. “He showed up and he said that he thought mobile was the future,” one former business-side staffer told me. “He believed that we needed to compete by building a real national product.” Bezos was often less assured when it came to understanding the newspaper’s history and culture. In October, 2014, Ben Bradlee, the Post’s editor during the seventies and eighties, died, at the age of ninety-three. Bezos did not plan to attend the funeral, which was to be held at the Washington National Cathedral. According to Baron’s memoir, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post,” Woodward sent Bezos an e-mail: “Understand you’re not coming to the Bradlee funeral. He was the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos hopped on his private jet and flew to Washington. “You could see him absorbing that he was buying not just a technological toy, but that he had bought a national treasure,” one funeral attendee told me. “In retrospect, it was a powerful moment.”

That same year, the Post’s Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, was imprisoned on espionage charges in Iran. When he and his wife were finally allowed to leave the country, in January, 2016, Bezos met them in Germany and flew them back to the U.S. on his plane, dropping them off in Key West for an all-expenses-paid vacation. A few days later, Rezaian appeared at the opening ceremony for the Post’s new headquarters on K Street, a sleek, light-filled space. “Important institutions like the Post have an essence, they have a heart, they have a core,” Bezos said at the event, “and if you wanted that to change, you’d be crazy.” Still, he sought to avoid unchecked nostalgia. “I’m a huge fan of leaning into the future,” he said. “Too much glamorizing of the past would certainly lead to paralysis.”

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, as Trump’s antics made headlines around the world, newspapers such as the Times and the Post quickly attracted more readers—the “Trump bump,” as the phenomenon came to be called. From the start, Bezos, as the proprietor of what Trump dubbed a “fake news” outlet, was a frequent target of the Republican nominee’s. In December, 2015, Trump tweeted that “the @washingtonpost loses money (a deduction) and gives owner @JeffBezos power to screw public on low taxation of @Amazon! Big tax shelter.” Bezos, according to Brad Stone’s 2021 book, “Amazon Unbound,” sent an e-mail to his head of communications: “Feel like I should have a witty retort. Useful opportunity (patriotic duty) to do my part to deflate this guy who would be a scary prez. I’m an inexperienced trash talker but I’m willing to learn. 🙂 Ideas?” Hours later, Bezos tweeted, “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace.”

Weeks before the election, the Post broke the story of Trump’s lewd comment to “Access Hollywood” ’s host Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals. Many of the paper’s blockbuster reports during the campaign covered Trump’s past business dealings in Russia and Russian interference in the election, a line of inquiry that only intensified after Trump’s victory. Soon after the Inauguration, the Post débuted a new motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” a favorite saying of Bob Woodward’s that was seen as a direct rebuke of the new President. (MacKenzie Scott had called an earlier option—“A Free People Demand to Know”—a “Frankenslogan.”) Behind the scenes, though, Bezos seemed to urge caution. Baron, in his book, writes that “in the days before Trump took office” Bezos had asked Hiatt, the opinion editor, to show “support for Trump on whatever issues he could.”

Otherwise, Bezos never interfered in newsroom decision-making, a distance that won him the affection of his paper’s journalists. At a Post event in 2016, Baron asked Bezos if he thought Trump was “now threatening to put one of your body parts through a wringer.” Bezos said that he had “a lot of very sensitive and vulnerable body parts but, if need be, they can all go through the wringer rather than do the wrong thing.” Later, Bezos installed an antique wringer in one of the paper’s conference rooms.

Bezos’s ownership of the Post was creating complications for his other businesses. Amazon held a large contract with the government to handle cloud computing for intelligence agencies, and it was in the running for a similar contract with the Pentagon worth ten billion dollars. In 2018, a source told Axios that Trump was “obsessed” with Amazon and had considered bringing an antitrust suit against the company and changing its tax status. The following year, Amazon lost the Pentagon’s cloud-computing contract to Microsoft. Amazon filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump had improperly pressured Defense Department officials on the decision. The Pentagon eventually scrapped the original contract and announced that, instead, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon would compete for parts of it on an ongoing basis. On paper, Robinson told me, Bezos had paid two hundred and fifty million dollars for the Post—“but, really, he paid ten billion.”

On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian dissident who, after leaving his home country, had become an opinion columnist for the Post, disappeared while visiting the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. “Let me know what I can do to help,” Bezos told the Post’s publisher at the time, Fred Ryan. The C.I.A. later concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had ordered the killing of Khashoggi, whose body was reportedly dismembered with a bone saw and carried out of the Embassy in suitcases. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had established close ties to the crown prince; the Administration was criticized for not doing more to pursue the perpetrators. The Post’s coverage of Khashoggi’s murder, which included breaking the news of the C.I.A.’s findings, earned the paper a spot as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service. But Bezos didn’t speak publicly about the incident until a year later, at a memorial event held on the anniversary of Khashoggi’s death. As CNBC reported, Amazon Web Services had been working on a deal to set up data centers in Saudi Arabia. Baron told me that, on such matters, Bezos often offered public comment only when explicitly asked to do so.

Privately, Bezos seemed to be undergoing an evolution. Whereas once he had been physically unprepossessing, he was now, thanks to regular cardio and weight-lifting sessions with a celebrity trainer, roped with muscle. He invariably showed off his new biceps and pecs by wearing a tight T-shirt. Close associates joked with him about his transformation, but it seemed more than skin-deep. In 2016, Amazon Studios distributed “Manchester by the Sea,” which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Bezos attended the ceremony for the first time. Seeing him in the thrall of Hollywood was perplexing, the former longtime employee said, and “honestly, hilarious. I was just, like, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

The biggest change of all was personal. On January 9, 2019, Bezos announced that, “after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation,” he and Scott were filing for divorce. The following day, the National Enquirer published a story that exposed his affair with Sánchez, a former television news reporter who was married to Patrick Whitesell, the executive chairman of the talent agency Endeavor; an accompanying photo caption identified Bezos as the “owner of The Washington Post.” Trump tweeted with apparent glee, “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post.”

A month later, in a post on Medium, Bezos accused the National Enquirer of blackmail. He seemed to imply that the Saudis, and perhaps Trump, who was a friend of the National Enquirer’s publisher David Pecker, were behind the leaking of some private texts. “It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy,” Bezos wrote. (It was later reported that Sánchez’s brother, Michael, had sold the texts to the National Enquirer for two hundred thousand dollars, which he denies.) Bezos went on to assure readers that “my stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.”

Less than a week after Biden was sworn in to office, in 2021, Baron announced that he would retire, a decision he had been contemplating for months. By then, the Post had close to three million digital subscribers; the newsroom employed more than a thousand journalists, nearly twice as many as when Baron started at the paper. “The Post is well positioned for the future,” he wrote in a letter to the newsroom. “We have now created a truly national and international news organization.” Baron’s tone projected confidence, but today many staff members view his departure as a critical turning point. “Marty Baron was the last editor of the Post able to communicate a clear editorial vision for it,” one former reporter told me.

When Trump lost the 2020 election, Bezos posted a picture on Instagram of a grinning Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and wrote, “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era.” But readers who had obsessively tracked Trump’s four convulsive years in office were ready to tune out the relative normalcy of the Biden White House; the Post lost about three hundred thousand subscribers in the first year of Biden’s Presidency. Some in the newsroom had warned that, to prepare for the end of Trump’s term, the Post needed to diversify its offerings—what Fred Ryan, the publisher, called a “bundle strategy”—in a manner similar to the Times, which had expanded its business through apps dedicated to cooking and games. Baron told me that he had begun to worry about the Post’s business model in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms, when it became clear that Trump might lose the general election. “I thought that we needed to bring Bezos in for a big strategy discussion,” he said. The meeting never happened.

In May, 2021, Sally Buzbee, who previously ran the Associated Press, was named the paper’s new executive editor. She had led an international newsroom, but staffers worried that she wouldn’t be able to imprint a new identity on the paper. “Sally was a wire-service person,” the former Post reporter said. “She spoke of each story as an autonomous thing, and the voice of the whole project started to get lost.”

That December, Hiatt, the opinion editor, died unexpectedly, of cardiac arrest, at the age of sixty-six. Seven months later, David Shipley, who had run Bloomberg Opinion and the Times editorial page, took over the job; the Post’s writeup of the hire noted that he was the “second top editor to be appointed by publisher Fred Ryan from outside the newspaper.” Many sensed that Ryan, a former aide in the Reagan White House and Bezos’s main contact at the paper, was eager to assert himself. “Fred felt like the newsroom was not the newsroom he really wanted,” a former longtime editor said. “I think some of that was personal—he just didn’t like a lot of people.”

Bezos, meanwhile, was becoming a far more public figure. Back in 2014, he had said, “I like to be at home. I like to be in the office. I feel disconnected from the office if I’m travelling a lot.” Now he and Sánchez were photographed having dinner in New York and Miami, shopping on St. Barts, wearing coördinated stripes at Wimbledon, and hosting a disco-themed New Year’s Eve party. In 2016, Bezos had purchased the largest private home in D.C., for twenty-three million dollars. Jean Case, the wife of an AOL founder, had told the magazine Washingtonian that Bezos and Scott were going to “revive the legacy of Kay Graham and her great socializing—bringing smart, interesting people together in a social context.” By the time the house made its début, in January, 2020, it was Sánchez, not Scott, who served as Bezos’s co-host for a black-tie gathering attended by Kellyanne Conway, Jerome Powell, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. The home, one person told Washingtonian, was “very theatrical.” Someone else who has visited told me that the house has the feel of a museum; Bezos has on display, among other rare collectibles, a lock from the Watergate break-in.

Bezos had stepped down as C.E.O. of Amazon in 2021, handing off its day-to-day operations to Andy Jassy, one of his longtime deputies. The following year, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, a bill that would have blocked online retailers from featuring their own brands’ goods and services more prominently on their platforms, passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support. Industry groups representing the likes of Amazon and Google launched a thirty-six-million-dollar ad campaign claiming that the bill would “threaten our fragile economic recovery.” The tech companies’ attitude, a former Senate staffer told me, was “We’re not here to negotiate. We are here to crush this thing and murder anyone who even thinks about voting for it.” The bill never made it to the Senate floor.

The Biden Administration had appointed Lina Khan, the author of a 2017 Yale Law Journal article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” to be the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan’s paper had argued that, given Amazon’s ubiquity in American life, the company should either be subject to strong antitrust enforcement or be regulated like a public utility. Shortly after Khan was confirmed by the Senate, Amazon filed a motion requesting that she recuse herself from regulatory actions involving the company. Instead, her agency aggressively pursued a number of open investigations into Amazon’s business practices. “Some of these companies and executives were used to a certain degree of legal immunity,” Khan told me. “So, when we started enforcing the law, it seemed to trigger a deep hysteria and backlash.”

Jay Carney, a former White House press secretary for Barack Obama, headed Amazon’s communications team, but the company’s relations with the Biden Administration and other Democratic politicians deteriorated. Biden met with labor leaders who supported Amazon workers’ unionization drive. Leading Party figures, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, routinely criticized the company’s reach. At one point, when a Democratic backbencher, Mark Pocan, of Wisconsin, tweeted about the company’s workers feeling so pressured to make timely deliveries that they skipped bathroom breaks, the Amazon News account responded, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” (The company later apologized for the tweet.)

In 2023, the F.T.C. and seventeen state attorneys general brought a suit against Amazon, claiming that it was illegally maintaining monopoly power. Bezos felt a sense of betrayal. “Jeff really stuck his neck out, in his view, in the first Trump term, and weathered all that heat and criticism,” a longtime Post staffer said. “And his thanks for that from the Biden Administration is to have Lina Khan unleashed on him.” Last year, the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen, a friend of Bezos’s who once gave generously to Democrats, announced that he would back Trump. In a recent interview with the Times, Andreessen said his cohort believed that the Biden Administration had targeted the tech industry “in a very broad-based way.” There were, he said, “lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions” about how things had gone “off the rails.”

In January, 2023, Bezos made a rare visit to the Post offices, sitting for a series of one-on-one meetings with a small number of the paper’s journalists. The company was in dire financial straits, set to lose money for the first time in years. Ryan had shuttered the newspaper’s Sunday magazine in late November, and, two weeks later, held a town hall with staff where he announced that a round of layoffs would be coming. The newsroom’s journalists, many of whom were members of the Washington Post Guild, the paper’s union, responded with increasingly pointed questions about Ryan’s leadership. “We’re not going to turn the town hall into a grievance session for the Guild,” he said, before abruptly exiting the stage. A video of Ryan’s retreat went viral. Afterward, Woodward sent a note to Bezos, telling him his involvement at the paper was needed.

Bezos set out to prove himself an attentive listener. During his meetings with Post journalists, he took copious notes in a leather-bound notebook, stopping occasionally to confirm that he understood certain points. One journalist who met with him said that he seemed interested in making acquisitions to rapidly expand the Post’s audience. Another was surprised by how out of touch he seemed with the paper. “He is isolated, and he hasn’t done the work to engage and be a hands-on owner,” the journalist said. “If you are going to own a media property right now, you need to be all in and understand the landscape.”

For years, most of Bezos’s ideas for the Post seemed based on his experience at Amazon. “He said, ‘I’d rather have two hundred million subscribers paying ten dollars a year than a smaller number paying a higher price,’ ” another former editor told me. “Just supersize the number. That was always his idea of a really successful digital news organization.” But, at a time when mainstream media outlets are widely distrusted, the number of people who want to pay for quality news in America is distinctly smaller than the number of those who want to order two-ply toilet paper that will arrive the next day. “For such a smart, accomplished guy, who has owned the business for as long as he has,” one person who’s had conversations with Bezos about the paper said, “he is too timid about the operating levers he can pull and too ambitious about the commercial reach of the paper.”

After his visit, Bezos had the thought, one person with knowledge of internal conversations said, that “the American media was too coastal, and that the Washington Post needed to get out of Washington.” He initiated what came to be called Project America, which explored ideas such as getting Substack writers from other U.S. cities to write a few times a month, or working with regional publications to license or co-publish stories. None of the initiatives have yet been launched, but Project America marked a new level of involvement for Bezos. “Fred Hiatt’s death was, in hindsight, even more of a catastrophe than it seemed,” a longtime staffer told me. Shipley, the Opinions section’s new editor, “understandably thought it would help everyone if Jeff were more engaged.” Instead, the staffer went on, “Bezos grabbed it with both hands.”

In June, 2023, Ryan stepped down as publisher. Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive who had run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and who has served on the Amazon board since 1997—replaced him as interim C.E.O. According to another former Post reporter, Stonesifer was shocked at the state of the paper’s business: “She felt Fred was either delusional or he was really ignorant about what the future of the paper looked like.” (Stonesifer denies questioning Ryan’s competence, saying he had a “solid grasp on the facts.”) That October, the Post announced that it would be cutting an additional two hundred and forty jobs. “I have come to think of her,” a Post reporter said of Stonesifer, “as the minister of death.”

In November, 2023, after a months-long search, Bezos announced that Will Lewis, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a veteran of Murdoch’s London tabloid empire, would be the new publisher of the Washington Post. The decision alarmed many in the paper’s orbit. Robert Kaiser, the former managing editor, said that he raised concerns about Lewis with Stonesifer. “I tried to explain to Patty that there was a huge gulf of cultures between British journalism and American journalism,” Kaiser told me. “It was very hard to imagine that a British journalist with Lewis’s biography—having been a Murdoch flunky—would ever win the respect of American journalists.”

Lewis had spent the early part of his career as a mergers-and-acquisitions reporter at the Financial Times, where his editor in New York was an Australian named Robert Thomson, who is now the C.E.O. of Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2006, at the age of thirty-seven, Lewis became the youngest-ever editor of the Daily Telegraph, which he overhauled to become more digitally focussed, creating a weeklong training program in a dummy newsroom. “It was an old, staid conservative newspaper,” one former Telegraph reporter said. “The readership was retired military and their wives, and Will turned it into a scoop-getting competitive newspaper.”

Lewis, who was raised in a middle-class home in a suburb of London, became a minor celebrity in the British press. His brother, Simon, had served as Queen Elizabeth’s communications secretary and went on to work for Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister. At the Telegraph, Lewis had “a clique of mannish guys,” the former reporter said, and a reputation for hard drinking. Private Eye nicknamed him “Thirsty” Will Lewis, but the Guardian noted, “No one has ever seen him drunk, late for work, or anything less than intensely focused.” A person who has known Lewis for decades described him to me as a “wide boy”—British slang for someone who survives by his wits, often on the wrong side of right.

In 2010, Lewis was hired by News International, a subsidiary of News Corp, where he reported directly to the company’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks. She and Lewis were friends; Brooks had attended Lewis’s fortieth-birthday party at a London pub, a casual bash featuring karaoke and a high-powered guest list that included the future Prime Minister David Cameron. At the time, Scotland Yard was investigating accusations that reporters at two of the company’s papers, News of the World and the Sun, had illegally hacked into the phones of politicians, celebrities, royals, and even a dead teen-age girl. Lewis, who was seen as “untainted,” according to a longtime colleague, was tapped to help contain the situation. Later, the New York Times reported that Scotland Yard suspected, according to internal documents, that News International was attempting to “steer the investigation into a very narrow remit,” by directing investigators to look at certain journalists and “steering the investigation away from other journalists and editors.”

In 2014, Brooks—a protégé of Murdoch’s—was cleared of hacking charges. But a News International editor named Andy Coulson was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. That year, Lewis got a promotion, moving to a role as publisher of the Wall Street Journal and C.E.O. of News Corp’s Dow Jones division, where he worked under Thomson, his former editor. Lewis oversaw rapid growth at the paper—during his tenure, the Wall Street Journal increased its digital-subscriber numbers from seven hundred thousand to more than two million—and in 2020 he was on a shortlist to become the next director general of the BBC. During the hiring process, documents emerged in lawsuits brought by dozens of individuals, including Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, who claimed that News International papers had illegally hacked their phones. The documents alleged that, while the company was being investigated, Lewis had approved a plan that resulted in the deletion of millions of e-mails from News International’s servers. Lewis has denied any illegal conduct. A month after the revelations, the BBC job went to another candidate.

Instead, Lewis helped found a news startup focussed on Gen Z and launched his own public-relations consultancy. He reportedly advised then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who held a series of parties at 10 Downing Street during the COVID pandemic, when lockdown rules were in place. According to the Guardian, after news of the Prime Minister’s infractions surfaced, Lewis recommended that Johnson and others “clean up” their phones. Both Lewis and Johnson have said that the story is untrue. Johnson later recommended Lewis for a knighthood, which he received in 2023.

That same year, Lewis was involved in an attempt to buy the Telegraph. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said that he had “significant expressions of interest from a wide range of potential backers.” The Daily Beast reported that one of the prospective investors he solicited was Jeff Bezos, which both Lewis and Bezos have denied. In any event, Lewis aborted his bid after Bezos hired him to run the Washington Post.

When Lewis started at the Post, in January, 2024, he held a town-hall meeting to introduce himself. Karen DeYoung, a journalist who had been at the paper for nearly fifty years, “was, like, ‘We know everyone loves the accent,’ but basically don’t bullshit us,” one of the former Post reporters told me. Still, Lewis was largely successful in early attempts to win over the newsroom. He sent detailed notes of praise for articles and sat in a glass office near the reporters and editors. “The Post is a very personable, tactile newsroom—people are friends,” one of the former Post reporters said. “Will brought back this chummy feeling.”

Sally Quinn, a former Post writer and the widow of Ben Bradlee, invited Lewis into her Georgetown social sphere. People liked his wife, Rebecca, she said—“an Emma Thompson type.” One of the couple’s children worked for Maggie Hassan, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, and was already living in D.C. Lewis and his wife purchased a Colonial Williamsburg-style house in a tucked-away corner of Georgetown for seven million dollars. Lewis told the Evening Standard of his plans for the Post—“We’re going to get our swagger back”—and attributed his rise to a “fear of being found out and getting up every day at five.”

Lewis had grand ambitions. “He very quickly declared that he soon wanted to have three million subscribers,” a former staffer said. He began hosting “say-it sessions,” where staff members were encouraged to describe what they thought the company was doing wrong. Many of them were simply eager to do anything that might help turn around the business. “Everything felt like a gimmick,” a former editor said. “You could tell there was a lot of bullshit, but maybe we needed that.”

Some early moves rankled the Post’s staff. Lewis made a troika of former Dow Jones strategists part of his close-knit executive team. His chief of staff appeared on the paper’s masthead one day without any internal announcement. Lewis also had his own communications staffer in London, who operated independently of the Post’s publicity department. (Recently, the Post’s chief communications officer resigned, reportedly owing to repeated clashes with Lewis.)

At Bezos’s behest, Lewis actively began searching for acquisition opportunities. Less than a month into his tenure, he sat for an interview with Ben Smith, the co-founder of the news site Semafor. As they began their conversation, Lewis appeared to propose some sort of partnership, telling Smith, “If we want to do something together, we should find a way to do some business.” Smith responded, “This is the wrong meeting.” Lewis was undeterred: “I think us partnering with startups and people in early phases is really good for us.” Later, Smith told me that Lewis never followed up. “I don’t think he was joking—Will is always trying to do some kind of deal,” Smith said. “Obviously, we would have been open to talking.”

Around the same time, Lewis and Buzbee travelled to Davos. According to one person with knowledge of the incident, as Buzbee was on her way to an early-morning meeting that she and Lewis had scheduled with top leadership of Microsoft to discuss, among other things, issues concerning A.I., she received a message from Lewis saying that he was sick and that Buzbee should attend solo. She was rattled that he would miss such an important meeting; the previous month, the Times had sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. A few hours later, Lewis appeared at another Davos event, in high spirits.

Meanwhile, tensions between Lewis and the newsroom were escalating. In March, the Post ran a story about the News International lawsuits in London; it later emerged that Lewis had put pressure on Buzbee not to run it, but Lewis has denied this. Matea Gold, a well-regarded managing editor, had initially overseen the Lewis reporting. Later, Cameron Barr, the former senior managing editor, was brought in and given final say over edits on stories about Lewis. A person who spoke with Lewis last year told me that Lewis thought American journalists were “obsessed with their own drama.”

That May, Lewis held a town-hall meeting announcing the “build it” phase of his strategy. The Post, he said, had lost seventy-seven million dollars the previous year. The paper would be moving toward a system that allowed readers to pay to access single articles, enabled by what he called “frictionless payments.” The paper would also be rolling out Post Pro and Post Plus, payment tiers that mimicked offerings from Politico and Punchbowl News, which charge a premium for industry-specific news stories. (Lewis has also been pursuing an acquisition of Punchbowl News.)

Eleven days later, the Times reported on a number of changes taking place at the Post. Lewis dashed off a note to the staff, confirming the story’s details: Buzbee was leaving her job as executive editor, and the Post was launching what he called a third newsroom, which would focus on producing service journalism and content for social media. “We’re all kind of, like, ‘What the fuck, a third newsroom? What are you talking about?’ ” one of the former reporters told me. Buzbee, who disagreed with the restructure, had been offered the job of running it. Seeing the move as a demotion, she had refused. Now she was out.

The next day, Lewis gathered the staff and introduced Matt Murray, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, who, he said, would be leading the newsroom through the election. A former colleague of Lewis’s from the Telegraph, Robert Winnett, would then take over as executive editor. “The cynical interpretation is that it sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies,” Ashley Parker, one of the paper’s White House correspondents, told Lewis. “And now we have four white men running three newsrooms.” (Parker later left the Post, along with several others, for The Atlantic.) Caroline Kitchener, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, pressed Lewis about whether he had interviewed any women or people of color for the job. Lewis erupted. “If you don’t like the way I’m doing things, you can feel free to leave,” he said. (Kitchener now works at the Times.) Later in the meeting, Lewis said, “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff, right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

Many journalists I spoke with described the moment as a mask falling away. “That was when it felt like we had entered a whole new era,” one of the former editors said. “It’s when I would say everybody started communicating with each other on Signal, rather than Slack.”

NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik later revealed that Lewis had attempted to persuade him not to run a story on the British lawsuits, and had offered in exchange an exclusive interview on the Post’s business plan—a quid pro quo that was a clear violation of journalistic ethics. In a story in the Post, which reported on Lewis’s efforts to get Buzbee not to publish stories about the lawsuits, he was quoted calling Folkenflik “an activist, not a journalist.” Lewis claimed the account of his meetings with Buzbee was “inaccurate,” as part of a parsing denial that disturbed many in the newsroom. “To have the publisher of the Washington Post playing some bullshit fucking game like that in our own paper was deeply embarrassing and troubling, because that’s what we do for a living,” another former Post reporter told me. “We go after powerful people who then come back with bullshit that is transparently deceptive, and then we blow it up.”

Within days, a team of reporters at the Post published a piece about Winnett, the incoming executive editor, that detailed how, as a journalist at Britain’s Sunday Times, he had worked with a trained actor who sometimes misrepresented himself to obtain information for stories. Winnett opted to walk away from the position. Bezos sent a note to the Post’s internal newsletter voicing implicit support for Lewis. “Team—I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to also weigh in directly: the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change,” Bezos wrote. “The world is evolving rapidly and we do need to change as a business. With your support, we’ll do that and lead this great institution into the future.”

Since last June, Lewis has gone into what a number of Post staffers described as a state of hiding. His relationship with Murray, the interim editor, suffered. “I know Will was very upset with Matt for the Post’s coverage and for some period of time wouldn’t talk to Matt,” a former senior editor at the Post told me. (Both Murray and Lewis deny this, though eventually Murray instituted a policy discouraging the paper from covering itself.) Rumors began circulating about Lewis drinking heavily in social settings. “One thing that has damaged him internally is that his drinking is widely known in the newsroom,” the former senior editor said. “It’s literally something his employees joke about.” (Lewis declined multiple requests to speak with me.)

That spring, Bezos and Sánchez purchased their third property on Indian Creek Island, in Miami-Dade County, where their neighbors include Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Sánchez is also friends with Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend, Bettina Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite. Bezos and Sánchez spent much of the summer island-hopping in the Mediterranean on Koru, a five-hundred-million-dollar superyacht whose name refers to a Maori symbol for new beginnings. They were joined at one point by Kim Kardashian, whose mother, Kris Jenner, had previously been spotted at Coachella with Sánchez and Bezos. (Sánchez and Kardashian employ the same publicist.) Sánchez is described by those who know her as warm and charming, with deep connections in the entertainment industry. “I think Lauren is very influential,” the former senior editor told me. “Maybe not in the hands-on decisions throughout the Post, but certainly in the orientation of it.”

The 2024 Presidential campaign was under way, and Lewis, Shipley, and others on the Post’s opinion pages were trying to speak with Bezos. An attempt to meet with him in late spring was waylaid, in part, by the fallout from Lewis’s disastrous all-hands meeting. In July, according to Axios, Bezos had a phone call with Trump, in which he recommended that the former President pick Doug Burgum, then the governor of North Dakota, as his running mate. In August, after Biden had dropped out of the race and Harris replaced him as the Democratic nominee, the opinion leadership was told that Bezos’s schedule was full until late September.

At that point, Shipley and two deputies flew to Miami to meet with Bezos and Lewis; the paper’s endorsement wasn’t on the agenda, but Bezos expressed mild curiosity about why the paper needed to endorse a candidate at all. Murray also met with Bezos and Lewis in Miami and later told other editors that Bezos wanted the paper to “widen its aperture,” one person said. “Jeff apparently started pulling up the Atlantic app and was saying, ‘Why don’t we do these stories?’ It was almost like someone who descended from another world.” Bezos had said that he wanted the Post to broaden its appeal, but he was pointing to a magazine with a targeted audience. Bezos also mentioned that he thought more firefighters from Nebraska should be reading the Post. (Bezos declined to speak with me.)

Just two weeks before the election, Bezos decided that he didn’t want the paper to endorse either candidate. Shipley tried to change his mind—given the timing, it would appear as if Bezos were bowing to Trump. Lewis, whose daughter was then working for the Harris campaign, announced the paper’s decision not to make an endorsement. The news was met with predictable outrage. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Baron, the former executive editor, wrote on X. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” Almost overnight, two hundred and fifty thousand Post subscribers cancelled their subscriptions. On the day of the announcement, the C.E.O. of Blue Origin met briefly with Trump after one of Trump’s rallies. Bezos has said that the two events were unrelated.

In an op-ed for the Post, Bezos attempted to explain his decision. He acknowledged that the announcement was poorly timed, and attributed this to “inadequate planning.” But the larger issue, he said, was Americans’ distrust in media. “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” he wrote. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.” Bezos’s words seemed pointedly directed at his own newsroom: “It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy.”

The paper still hadn’t decided on an executive editor after Winnett’s appointment fell through. Gold, who had helped run the coverage of the News International lawsuits, was vying for the position. When it was decided that she would not advance in the process, Wayne Connell, the head of H.R., not Lewis, delivered the news. The top candidate, Clifford Levy, a deputy managing editor at the Times, withdrew his name from consideration. No other outside candidates remained, leaving Murray as the de-facto leader. Lewis never officially announced that Murray had the job. Instead, a Times reporter wrote in early January that Murray, in response to a question at a meeting, had confirmed that he would continue on as the head editor.

Since 1983, the Post has held the annual Eugene Meyer Awards to honor staff across the organization, from reporters and editors to print-plant managers. “The whole point of the Eugene Meyer Awards is about the whole company as a community and all the departments that have to work together,” one Post journalist said. “It’s so that everyone understands all the other pieces. And it really makes you feel a part of something special.” When the Grahams presided over the awards, the event had the feeling of a family holiday party.

Last year, awards were given, but without a company-wide ceremony. Staff members were upset. One person called it part of Lewis’s “De-Grahamification” of the Post. The newsroom decided to host an informal gathering anyway, assembling just before Christmas. The tone was sombre. Sally Jenkins and Dan Balz, two longtime staffers, became emotional, talking about what the paper had meant to them. Lewis, who had only occasionally been seen in the newsroom since the previous spring’s all-hands meeting, did not attend.

Instead, in January, he hosted a small dinner for the awardees in one of the building’s private suites. Lewis skipped the cocktail hour, but spoke during the seated dinner about how the paper’s recent innovations had made it the envy of its competitors. Earlier in the month, the Post had débuted a new internal mission statement—“Riveting Storytelling for All of America”—and the paper’s chief strategy officer, Suzi Watford, had laid out a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of generating two hundred million “paying users” through a flexible payment system and “distribution partnerships.” When I spoke with Watford, she said that such targets are typically attached to a ten-year horizon; the Post wasn’t attaching any hard time horizons.

News websites such as those of CNN and the Times are often visited by more than a hundred million users in a month, but a slim margin of them are paying subscribers. The Post currently has about 2.5 million digital subscribers; the Times has 11.4 million. One of the former Post editors called the idea of generating two hundred million paying users “intellectually dishonest,” in part because it sidestepped the issue of who the Post thought its audience should be. Bezos, in his op-ed about the Presidential endorsement, had said that the Post and the Times “talk only to a certain elite”—but a certain élite is also who is most willing to pay for news. Going forward, Watford said, “I think we will have a much broader appeal.”

Don Graham had been invited to the event as a nod to the paper’s legacy. He rose to speak and gave a history of the awards. Then he went off script. Graham, who is eighty and still worth half a billion dollars, had not tried to be involved in the Post’s leadership decisions, he said. But during the past few months many staff members had reached out to him. Morale, he said, was low. Lewis, sitting nearby, stared at his place setting. “It was such a wild moment,” one attendee told me.

Dozens of staffers have left the Post in recent months. Earlier this year, after Philip Rucker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, received an offer from CNN, Lewis scheduled a meeting with him. It was supposed to be a final attempt to keep a high-profile journalist, but Lewis cancelled at the last minute. Hundreds of staff members had sent a letter to Bezos that day, asking him to intervene at the paper. “We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent,” the authors wrote.

One person who has had conversations with the Post’s leadership said that Lewis and his top deputies now speak of the newsroom with “vitriol.” “They were constantly infantilizing them and constantly talking about how they needed to be disciplined,” the person said. (A spokesperson for the Post denied this, saying that Lewis has “tremendous respect and appreciation for his colleagues.”) In exit interviews, meanwhile, staff members have attributed their departures to Lewis’s lack of a discernible plan for the paper. “The idea that the newsroom is the reason for the Post’s struggles is unfair,” one former top editor said. “The newsroom is not always its own best friend, but Will somehow convinced Jeff that it is the problem, when really there is no business strategy.” Murray acknowledged to one departing staffer, “Will has his challenges.”

Bezos has not visited the paper since before the election. The day after Trump won, he posted on X, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” A few weeks later, at the Times’ DealBook Summit, in New York, he told the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin that Trump was “calmer than he was the first time, and more confident, more settled.” Bezos was “optimistic” that Trump seemed “to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation.” Sorkin asked Bezos how he planned to fix the Post. “I have a bunch of ideas, and I’m working on that right now,” Bezos said. “So we’ll see. You know, we saved the Washington Post once. This will be the second time.”

Just before Christmas, Bezos and Sánchez dined with Trump and his wife, Melania, at Mar-a-Lago. During the meal, according to the Wall Street Journal, Melania told Bezos and Sánchez about a documentary project she was developing based on her own life. Two weeks later, Amazon licensed the film for forty million dollars, nearly three times more than the company had ever spent on a documentary. As much as twenty-eight million dollars of the licensing fee will go directly to the First Lady.

In late February—after Trump pardoned the defendants of the January 6th riot, announced tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and signed executive orders banning diversity initiatives in the federal government, denying the existence of transgender people and barring them from serving in the military, overturning birthright citizenship, and declaring a national emergency at the southern border—Bezos announced the new direction of the Opinions section. “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” Bezos wrote in a note to the staff. “I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Shipley, the section’s editor, stepped down. That evening, Bezos had dinner with Trump.

In the aftermath of Bezos’s announcement, the Post moved to shut down dissenting opinions. A column about the directive by Erik Wemple, the Post’s media critic, was reportedly killed. Ruth Marcus, a columnist who had worked at the paper for more than four decades, left after Lewis killed a piece that was critical of Bezos’s instructions. (Marcus later wrote about the experience for The New Yorker.) Eugene Robinson also quit, writing, “The announced ‘significant shift’ in our section’s mission has spurred me to decide that it’s time for my next chapter.”

When Bezos was first contemplating changes to the Post’s Opinions section, he discussed the issue with Barry Diller, the media mogul who, alongside Murdoch, helped found the Fox Broadcasting Company. “I did speak extensively with him when he was thinking of adopting a more refined, let’s call it, editorial policy,” Diller told me. The new focus, Diller said, reflected views that Bezos has long held. But there was also a risk, Diller acknowledged. Bezos’s motivations could be misconstrued as pursuing an “evenhanded relationship with a new and potentially dangerous Administration.” That, unfortunately or not for Bezos, seems to have come to pass. “I’ve gotten to know him, and I think he’s trying to do a real job,” Trump said of Bezos in March. “Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before.”

Bezos has yet to clarify what, exactly, a focus on “free markets and personal liberties” might mean for the Post’s Opinions section. He and Sánchez are both devoted readers of Bari Weiss’s Free Press, a Substack publication that espouses a broadly anti-woke ideology. Last year, the couple hosted a book party for the author Jonathan Haidt, which was attended by Kardashian, John Legend, and Tom Hanks; Weiss moderated the evening’s conversation. Matthew Continetti, a conservative columnist at the Free Press, is rumored to be in the running to become the Post’s next opinion editor. Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor of Reason, a libertarian monthly, has also been interviewed for the job. (Reason’s slogan is “Free Minds and Free Markets.”) Watford told me, “I’m really excited about being very transparent about what the opinion pages will stand for.”

In April, Bezos sent Sánchez, a licensed helicopter pilot, to space for eleven minutes on the first all-female space mission since 1963. That same month, the U.S. Space Force announced that it had awarded the largest share of its launch contracts, worth nearly six billion dollars, to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, has overseen a chaotic and unprecedented slashing of federal jobs and programs, and has also expressed skepticism about the need to send spacecraft to the moon. Blue Origin has a $3.4-billion contract to build and test a lunar lander for NASA.

The Post, despite an exodus of high-profile talent, has remained competitive during the second Trump Administration, breaking stories on DOGE and the excesses of the White House’s immigration crackdown. As a longtime Post reporter told me, “There’s just something really freaking heroic about this group that is nailing exclusives while so many editors and role models have gone.”

In May, the Post won two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for the work of the editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes. Telnaes had resigned in January, after her sketch of a group of tech and media moguls, including Bezos, prostrating themselves before Trump was rejected. (In a statement, Shipley said that the sketch was turned down because the paper had already assigned two columns about the same subject. “The only bias was against repetition,” he said.) Lewis didn’t show up to the Pulitzer announcement in the newsroom. Murray told the assembled staff that he was away on a long-planned trip.

For Bezos, being on Trump’s good side has its benefits. Back in 2017, Trump tweeted that Amazon’s arrangement with the Postal Service was “making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer.” Recently, the Post reported that a leading candidate for Postmaster General had been the head of a trade group that represents Amazon. After Trump announced a new round of steep tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, Amazon was reportedly considering a feature that would reveal how much the policy increased the prices of goods. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called the move a “hostile and political act.” Bezos and Trump soon spoke. “I asked him about it,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that,’ and he took it off immediately.” The Trump Administration now has the authority to settle the F.T.C.’s case against Amazon, which is scheduled to go to trial in October, 2026.

There has been some speculation that Bezos might sell the Post, but he recently told one interested buyer that it is not for sale. “He doesn’t really care what people think of him,” Baron, the former executive editor, told me. Last year, after deciding to block the paper’s endorsement, Bezos wrote, “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled.” Still, he added, “you are of course free to make your own determination.” ♦