Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach him this: the whole strategy behind the business that made him rich, Amazon.com, was to become a universal retailer, a platform – the platform – for everything sold. Bezos wasn’t just a successful merchant in a given market, or even successful in every market. He became the merchant who owned the marketplace itself. 

So what led him to waste his money on the Washington Post?

It has been a waste: we know Bezos clearly isn’t happy with the Post because he keeps changing it, and we know Post employees aren’t happy with him because they tell us. The Post’s readership is no more satisfied, as demonstrated by avalanches of cancellations the paper has had to endure recently. Bezos bought the Post for $250 million in 2013 and has poured countless millions more into the operation since then. Could he have sown........

© The Spectator