The Literally Insensitive Jeff Bezos
You know it's hard out there for a centibillionaire.
One of the themes I stressed in The Ideas Industry was the role that plutocrats played in the cultivation of the marketplace of ideas. On the one hand, many of these billionaires take ideas very seriously. On the other hand, as Chrystia Freeland has previously documented, the increasingly insular experience of the daily life of billionaires skews their beliefs about what is important in the world. And as the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has documented on multiple occasions, this can lead to some rather bizarre worldviews.
This bring us to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post. I think it’s safe to say that he’s growing out of touch with the mass public.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made no secret of its disappointment with Bezos’ heel turn, particularly his recent stewardship of the Washington Post. Yesterday he sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC and explained why he had decided to cull WaPo’s staff:
Now there are a few things about this clip.
Bezos is right to prioritize the Post’s investigatory journalism. As per usual with these things, plutocrats usually get a few things right;
I don’t know a ton about poetry, but declaring that it only has value if it rhymes seems… way off?!
Conflating value with profitability is a classic plutocratic move, but it conveniently absolves the plutocrat from any bad business decisions.
It’s that last point in particular that stands out with Bezos, because his business decisions about the Post have been baffling. A year ago, the New York Times reported that when Bezos announced his intention to pivot the Post’s opinion section towards his own libertarian political and economic beliefs, opinions editor David Shipley explicitly warned him that this would cause the Post to lose subscribers. Bezos’ response? “I don’t care.”
Bezos should care if his goal is profitability. As the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World noted a few months ago, Bezos’ pivot towards a more right-leaning, Trump-friendly libertarian bent was a business choice as blinkered as Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to go all-in on virtual reality.
I’m hardly the only person to reach this conclusion:
Status’ Natalie Korach recently documented one example of this misbegotten business strategy: investing a ton into a state-of-the-art podcasting studio for the opinion section’s “Make It Make Sense” podcast and attracting fewer than 700 subscribers.
As TNR’s Parker Molloy explains, “Bezos laid off the people who win the Pulitzers. He’s funding the people who lose the subscribers. Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24 percent year over year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6 percent over the same period. CNN was up 3 percent. The Post is in its own category.”
Ross Douthat made a similar assessment yesterday: “The business issue for the Post isn't that Bezos made cuts; it's that he wants an ideological pivot into a market that's in the hands of rivals (WSJ, Free Press, Economist) during a time in the political cycle that's bad for right-leaning media brands.”
If Bezos wants to say that mainstream media outlets should be profitable, that’s fine. If he wants the Post to take a more libertarian bent because it reflects his worldview, that’s fine. But he can’t have both, not in 2026, because it’s clear that his editorial preferences have exacerbated his operating losses.
Unfortunately, it seems doubtful that anyone will make this point directly to Bezos. Last month director Noah Hawley wrote a doozy of an Atlantic essay describing his time at a Bezos-funded Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California — “an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort.”
Hawley’s essay echoes some of my Ideas Industry observations: “It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.” Or “To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.”
Hawley went even further, however, in describing the psychological effects of being a centibillionaire,1 concluding with a description of his one interaction with Bezos at the retreat:
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all….
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark….
How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.
This helps to explain how, during his CNBC interview. Bezos said that Donald Trump is a, “more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. Trump has lots of good ideas, and he has done a lot of — he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”
CNBC noted that Bezos “did not offer specifics” on what Trump was right about; I’ll merely point out that a large and increasing fraction of the American people disagree with Bezos’ assessment.
Bezos, has become literally insensitive to public opposition to anything he says or does. He can no longer comprehend mass public opinion. He is insensitive to underlying political shifts. He exercises no empathy. And I strongly suspect that this baffles him.
And helping viewers understand where Hawley got his inspiration for the evil plutocrat character Kid Cavalier in Alien: Earth.
Fascinating. We’ve been watching as the billionaires seem increasingly detached from reality - and even becoming odd and non-tethered to common sense. All the billionaires have increasingly wacko theories and bizarre lives. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel - each weirder than the last. This article starts to explain what full detachment from society does to you …
Eventually Louis XVI and his wife had to face reality.