He says so:

The Amazon founder complained to Trump over dinner that nobody there listened to him before slashing staff, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book. …

Bezos’ failure to shape the newsroom in his worldview wasn’t for lack of trying. In the weeks leading up to the November 2024 election, he personally intervened to squash the paper’s already-written endorsement of Kamala Harris. And as he posted on X in February 2025, weeks after slashing staff, the paper’s new insubordination-free opinion page would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” The damage had already been done, however. After seeing the nearly 150-year-old media institution reduced to a rag in the ill-equipped hands of a would-be Hearst, it’s no surprise Post subscribers abandoned ship in droves.

Justin Caffier, “Jeff Bezos Called Washington Post His Worst Investment and Staff He Laid Off ‘Terrible’ People,” Gizmodo, June 18, 2026

According to the publisher, the book Caffier refers to, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (June 23, 2026) by White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first.”

The animus against Trump that apparently drives the book, Gizmodo’s account, and most readers’ reactions preempts discussion of a fundamental question: Is the newspaper format still viable in the internet age?

The entire way a newspaper is prepared, printed, and sold takes for granted the limitations of pre-Internet media. One could say the same for radio and TV. However, some media, like TV, can adapt — with some adjustments — to the online world. Newsprint is the least likely traditional medium to do so.

It all started in 1968 at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, when engineers decided to try shipping data through the telephone wires… Neither Donald Trump nor Jeff Bezos is responsible for that.