Proclaiming that we reside in a tech-centric society understates its saturation.
Software program, particularly machine studying and AI, coupled with superior manufacturing has delivered expertise to avenue corners, colleges, workplaces, factories, and even farm fields. This tech, a lot of it created in Silicon Valley, sits in your wrist, is carried in your pocket, built-in within the motion pictures you watch, and perhaps within the music you take heed to. And it’s actually the means by which that Amazon package deal was ordered, sorted, and delivered to the doorstep.
It has turned its founders, executives, and center managers into king-like figures, whose wealth and political affect mirrors the Gilded Age. Seven of the highest 10 richest individuals on the planet can tie their wealth on to tech. Amazon co-founder, chairman, and Washington Put up proprietor Jeff Bezos is third, behind simply Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, in keeping with Forbes, which tracks wealth and the individuals who have it. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founders Larry Web page and Sergey Brin, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spherical out the record.
And on this second, the Bezos-owned Washington Put up has gutted its protection of them and the tech trade at giant as a part of a sweeping set of layoffs that affected greater than 300 individuals. The staff that features tech, science, well being and enterprise was minimize by greater than half from 80 to 33 individuals, in keeping with tech reporter Drew Harwell. The tech desk alone minimize 14 individuals. Its San Francisco bureau is a shell.
Amongst these affected embrace reporters protecting Amazon, synthetic intelligence, web tradition, and investigations. The newspaper additionally laid off employees protecting the media trade (which had beforehand reported on Bezos’ possession over their very own paper).
The Put up minimize its total sports activities bureau and almost annihilated its overseas reporting groups, together with its Center East desk, and reporters and their editors protecting Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others. It closed its Books part, decimated protection of tradition and the DC Metro space, and laid off all reporters and editors protecting race and ethnicity points nationally.
The protection of tech isn’t extra necessary than social, financial, and geopolitical points. However by no means earlier than have the individuals exerting outsized affect on the world’s geopolitics and financial system additionally been so straight chargeable for stemming the worldwide circulate of details about it.
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June 23, 2026
The world facilities on tech and is tied to the GDP progress — or retreat — of its superpowers. Tech’s strongest executives are asking the general public to put their consideration elsewhere.
The Put up’s govt editor Matt Murray couched the layoffs as a reboot of kinds aimed toward reaching readers and ultimately profitability, in keeping with the New York Occasions, which included feedback he made to employees.
“If something, at present is about positioning ourselves to change into extra important to individuals’s lives in what’s changing into a extra crowded, aggressive, and sophisticated media panorama,” he reportedly mentioned throughout a Zoom assembly with employees.
It’s no secret The Put up has misplaced cash and subscribers in recent times, in some instances because of insurance policies crafted or backed by Bezos. As an example, his directive to finish presidential endorsements by The Put up’s editorial board, axing a drafted piece backing Kamala Harris, reportedly led to “lots of of hundreds” of canceled subscriptions, per NYT. It reportedly suffered $100 million in losses in 2024, partially due to the cancellations.
Its internet site visitors has additionally declined. Semafor reported that day by day visits have been right down to round 3 million by the center of 2024, from 22.5 million in January 2021.
The Put up minimize its employees from 1,000 to below 800 final spring, with CEO Will Lewis calling out the $100 million loss from the earlier yr.
The layoffs at The Put up, after all, don’t exist in a vacuum. (The media trade, and never simply legacy gamers, has been stricken by a fragmented viewers and adjustments to Google Search algorithms which have directed readers away from information shops and in the direction of its personal AI generated solutions.)
The dimensions, scope, and placement of these hatchet strikes benefit scrutiny, nevertheless. Significantly contemplating the shift in media possession over the previous 15 years.
Bezos’ acquisition of the Put up in 2013 for $250 million was met with a mixture of skepticism and hope, by weary journalists who had skilled consolidation, layoffs, and the rising pains of shifting from a print-only to digital-dominant media trade.
His acquisition turned a part of a broader development on the time by which billionaires, many with backgrounds in tech, snapped up beleaguered media organizations properly worn from the earlier go public-private fairness cycle.
Just a few years after Bezos purchased The Put up, Laurene Powell Jobs made her buy of The Atlantic, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff purchased Time Inc., and pharmaceutical govt Patrick Quickly-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Occasions.
Bezos, like Benioff and Quickly-Shiong (who additionally blocked his paper’s endorsement of Harris), moved nearer to Trump after he received the 2024 election. His spaceflight firm Blue Origin depends on federal contracts, and Amazon had confronted elevated scrutiny below earlier administrations.
Lewis was reportedly not current to supervise the employees cuts and adjustments at The Put up (Murray advised Fox Information that the CEO “had a variety of issues to are likely to at present”). Nor was Bezos. As his newspaper ready to chop one-third of its employees, Bezos spent Monday with Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth in Florida, main him on a tour of Blue Origin’s amenities.
Lower than 48 hours later, The Washington Put up would lay off the journalist who reported on Blue Origin.
The darkness, it appears, is creeping in.
