Jeff Bezos Complained To President Trump About ‘Terrible’ Staff At Washington Post: Reports

While he might come across to some as another left-leaning tech billionaire, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has demonstrated a willingness to shake up the political bias at the Washington Post since he purchased that publication.

The result has been backlash from the overwhelmingly leftist staff, and recent reports indicate that Bezos bemoaned their attitudes to none other than the president himself.

According to the New York Post:

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called the Washington Post his worst investment in a conversation with President Trump months before gutting the newsroom, according to a new book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.

ADVERTISEMENT

“The people there are terrible,” Bezos told Trump over dinner in December 2024, according to an excerpt obtained by The Post ahead of the June 23 release of “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.“

“They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” Bezos said, focusing his ire at the business side of the publication after losing more than $100 million that year.

About two months after the dinner, Bezos ordered the Washington Post’s opinion pages to promote “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” — as subscribers peeled off in protest of the paper withholding its endorsement from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

The report evoked a range of responses on social media:

This was both the funniest and the saddest thing I read today. Funny bc its employees are getting the rebuke they deserve.

Sad, bc WaPo lost sight of its mission and its entitled employees sunk a once great paper/ institution.

Katharine Graham must be rolling in her grave. 😢

— x (@LAGatorGal) June 18, 2026

Nice try Bezos, you knew what was going on with WAPO, now he is kissing up to him for a favor I am sure.

— Just Talking Shit (@talkinshit101) June 18, 2026

That’s the difference between Bezos and Musk. One does nothing about it, the other fixes the issue.

— Mr Sinatra (@MrSinatra_MDW) June 17, 2026

As the Daily Caller added:

Trump admitted he once loathed the Amazon chief over the paper’s coverage. “He said they write stories about him. And I didn’t believe him the first time, first term. And I hated him for it,” Trump recalled in the New York Post. “And then I believed him.”

The dinner followed the Post’s decision to skip a 2024 endorsement, which Bezos defended in an October op-ed. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he wrote. Opinion editor David Shipley resigned after Bezos redirected the section toward personal liberties and free markets, the New York Times reported.

ADVERTISEMENT

Here’s how Bezos defended his decision to break with tradition by not issuing an endorsement ahead of the 2024 election: