Tech podcaster Kara Swisher told Axios this week that she is attempting to round up a group of wealthy investors to put together a bid to purchase The Washington Post amid its ongoing turmoil under Jeff Bezos’ ownership.
Even though Bezos has not expressed any willingness or interest in selling the paper, Swisher believes that the ultra-rich Amazon founder will look to unload the Post due to the compounding headaches swirling around the outlet – many of which lie at the mega-billionaire’s feet.
Swisher, the host of popular podcasts Pivot and On with Kara Swisher, began her career working in the Post’s mailroom. She eventually became one of the most influential tech journalists in the industry, moving on to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She ultimately launched the Recode website, which was acquired by Vox Media in 2015. Since then, she was named editor-at-large at New York magazine and joined CNN as an on-air contributor.
Due to her deep connections in Silicon Valley and her star status at Vox Media, Swisher believes that she can drum up enough capital to convince Bezos to dump the paper. In her opinion, he’d eventually want to unload it not just because of the recent difficulties surrounding the Post but also because his financial interests conflict with owning the paper.
“The Post can do better,” she told Axios. “It’s so maddening to see what’s happening. ... Why not me? Why not any of us?”
As first reported by Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, Swisher began floating this idea back in late October.
At the time, the Post had come under intense fire from readers and journalists alike over Bezos blocking the paper’s planned presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris. Darcy reported that the turmoil caused by Bezos’ meddling, which resulted in over 250,000 subscribers ditching the Post, prompted a number of potential suitors to position themselves to take the storied broadsheet off of the billionaire’s hands.
“An intriguing possibility landed on my radar earlier this week, when I learned that the media personality and entrepreneur Kara Swisher has told people she is interested in assembling a consortium of wealthy investors to make a bid for the newspaper, should Bezos opt to sell,” Darcy reported this fall. “Of all the possibilities, of course, this is easily the most engrossing. It’s also not difficult to see a world in which Swisher could very well recruit wealthy investors for such a play. Swisher’s idea, as I understand it, would be to merge Vox Media with The Post, given the former would fill in some of the gaps the latter could use, such as a more robust podcasting business.”
Now Swisher is telling Axios that a banker she has worked with in the past is helping her strategize a plan on buying the Post going forward. If she could get a group together to convince Bezos to sell, the “paper would be run by a board of civic-minded people willing to write a big check to be part of something important.” She also said she’d be willing to keep Bezos on board as a minority investor.
While she feels that the money is there to make a pitch, adding that there are plenty of “giant private equity firms and other power-minded billionaires,” there is one person she definitely doesn’t want to be involved.
“Hopefully not Elon [Musk],” Swisher declared, “though he seems pretty busy these days being President (Not) Elect.”
While she has been a frequent critic of Musk’s over the past couple of years, Swisher used to be friendly with the mercurial billionaire and helped promote him as a “genius” in the tech industry. According to Swisher’s recent book, though, the relationship became strained since the pandemic and finally broke down after Musk called her an “a*****” in 2022 over a misinterpreted tweet.
Musk, who has become a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, and Bezos are the two wealthiest men in the world and have long been positioned as business rivals. However, the ice may be breaking between the two – especially since the Amazon mogul has become increasingly MAGA-curious in recent months.
Besides tanking the Post’s Harris endorsement, Bezos gushed after the election over Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback” and has even donated $1 million to the incoming president’s inaugural fund. On top of that, Bezos had dinner with Trump and Musk at Mar-a-Lago this week.
