There's an old joke: "How do you end up with a million dollars?"

Answer: Start with ten million.

It seems that the CEO of Everything not Owned by Musk, Jeff Bezos, has decided to live this joke and see how it feels. And not for the first time, as apparently he enjoys downsizing. Perhaps he need to save money for a trophy wife? Or maybe his financial statements just started showing too many zeroes after numbers and that was confusing him, so he decided to lose some of those zeroes.

Thing is, the CEO of Everything... is making the classic Publisher mistake. Downsizing the staff that actually produces your content first by 20% and today by another 35%, is a quick way to lose traction with those that pay for said content.

Of course, Mr. CEO already has long been fully on top of dissatisfying customers of the Washington Post, doing things from disallowing an endorsement of a political candidate (Kamala) to reducing the opinion section to only opinions supporting blatant capitalism while kneeling to the King, to cutting back on content that the readership actually wanted, to...well, he's pretty much used his CEO Ax to cut down anything he found in the Washington Post offices.

I had to go back and re-read some original reporting I looked at for this story because the AI engines—themselves a proven way of how to not generate content the audience wants—seem to be reporting a "US$100m loss in revenue" at the Post last year as if that were the actual dollar loss. No, it was "the collapse in digital readership—partly due to that CEO Ax hitting content in the jugular—which produced US$100m less revenue in 2024 than in 2023. Who knows how big the loss was (or wasn't; it's possible that with all the cutbacks any actual loss was far less)? Still, the Post's financial barometer is clearly moving in the wrong direction. Expect further storms.

Let's see, at the start of the Biden Nodding Off Presidency the Bezos-owned Washington Post supposedly had 22.5m online readers. Today it may have as few as 2m (it's a private company, so verified numbers aren't available). This simply says that the Great Post wasn't actually posting great content that the readers wanted. We know that about 250,000 of those readers said goodbye in the couple of days after the CEO Ax took away the Post's endorsement of Kamala the day before it was to be published. However, for some time now the writers readers came to the Post for have all been given early retirement offers (as in "I'll pay to get rid of you."). Most of those writers were smart, and took those offers.

The irony is that the New York Times, which I'm pretty sure Bezos thought he was buying a clear rival for, yesterday reported that they added 450,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, bringing their total to 12.78m. And the NYT's operating profit increased 10.5% year over year.

In the aftermath of the 300 dismissals-by-email, we now know that the the Washington Post no longer has any staff photographers, no sports reporters, reduced International news coverage (including the elimination of the entire Middle East staff and a reporter currently in Ukraine reporting on that war), and is dropping its coverage of books in the Sunday edition.

Of course, the press release tries to frame things differently: according to that, the mass firing "place[s] the Washington Post on a stronger footing." I've seen this claim before from almost every media company that has self-destructed. The simple fact of the matter is this: you're only as good as the quality (and quantity) of your output. For the Washington Post, most of us already noticed that the quality was down. Now it will go down more, as will the quantity (and depth and breadth over coverage). Hello death spiral.

So the CEO of Everything... really only has himself to blame for any shredding of his paper. I sure hope he enjoys the joke, because next year it might be "How do you end up with a hundred thousand dollars..."