A Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after it refused to publish her satirical cartoon showing the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, kneeling before Donald Trump alongside other technology and media barons.

Ann Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack post, warning that the Post’s decision not to run the cartoon was a “game changer” and “dangerous for a free press”.

The cartoon depicted Bezos, the owner of Amazon, alongside the Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and the OpenAI founder Sam Altman genuflecting before a statue of Trump and offering bags of cash to the president-elect before his return to the White House. The billionaire tech moguls have contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund as they scramble to build ties with the incoming administration.

The cartoon also showed Mickey Mouse prostrate before Trump, a reference to the decision by ABC News, which is owned by Disney, to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the president-elect.

Explaining her decision to resign, Telnaes said she had worked for the Post since 2008 but “in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.” She added: “The cartoon that was killed criticises the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favour with the president-elect.”

David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, defended the decision not to publish Telnaes’s cartoon. In a statement Shipley said he disagreed with her “interpretation of events” and that “the only bias was against repetition” of another piece that was set to be published.

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said, adding that he had spoken with Telnaes and urged her to reconsider leaving.

Telnaes’s cartoon went viral on social media on Saturday and Sunday.

Bezos’s ownership of the Post has come under scrutiny over recent weeks. The newspaper faced a backlash after it declined to endorse a candidate before the presidential election in November. The editorial board was poised to back Kamala Harris before Bezos intervened to block the move.

Bezos defended the decision but the Post reported that more than 250,000 readers had cancelled their subscriptions in protest.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, was also featured in the cartoon after the paper similarly lost thousands of subscribers following its refusal to endorse either presidential candidate.

Bezos announced in December that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and make a $1 million in-kind contribution. He has described Trump’s victory as “an extraordinary political comeback”. He and other tech moguls, including Zuckerberg, have dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida since he won the election.