Subject: Re: Washington Post Floundering
They were losing $77M a year. What was Bezos supposed to do? Just keep paying the same people to lose more readers?

Even Andrew Carnegie eventually realized that all his stacks of money weren’t doing anybody any good, so he started funding libraries all over the country. The Ford Foundation invested in health care and helped support the Detroit Symphony, Detroit Institute of the Arts, and other local causes in and around Michigan.

The Bill Gates Foundation has used its monies to support health initiatives around the world, and the Rockefellers used their money to support public lands, health, and other worthy causes.

What is Bezos doing with his? Buying bigger yachts? He’s worth $252 billion. Losing $75 million a year means the nation’s capital could have a functioning newspaper for another 3,360 years before it ran out, assuming none of it was invested and it made no interest of any kind along the way.

If you took the 252,000,000,000 and just got 3% interest in a passbook savings account, you would have 100 times the funding necessary to keep the WaPo going every year , with another 7 billion and change left over.

So yeah, he could do this. Or he could choose something else, but at the moment he’s choosing nothing, and destroying the best last hope for communication and information in the capital of the country. Or, as the mast head is about to proclaim: Democracy … in Darkness.