On July 9, one of Jeff Bezos’ two 22-seat Gulfstream G650ERs will deliver him to Sun Valley in Idaho for America’s most concentrated annual gathering of power. On arrival, he is sure to see an old friend: Don Graham, the former publishing magnate and son of Katharine.
Graham sold Bezos the Washington Post, his family’s paper since 1933, for $250m in 2013 in a deal structured at Sun Valley. “I do not know a finer man,” Bezos said of him at the time. He was full of optimism: Graham had sold him on the idea that he could change journalism. But after some initial success, Bezos now owns a paper that lost $77m last year. Its audience has halved since the “Trump bump” of the late 2010s. And Will Lewis, the British CEO to whom he turned to jump-start his title, has become the subject of a reporting frenzy.
Now new revelations are severely challenging Lewis’ account of his past, and bringing into question how much Bezos could have known about the man he hoped would fix the Post.
