Jeff Bezos is no longer relentlessly focused on customer satisfaction

The fallout from the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris at The Washington Post is here: more than 200,000 canceled subscriptions, NPR reports. This is about 8 percent of the paid subscriber base, and the number of cancellations is still growing.

To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. Like, I am actually flabbergasted: that’s fifty times as many cancellations in one weekend as The Post earned in the better part of a year.

Now, there have been multiple reports at this point — from NPR, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post itself — that the call to stop endorsing candidates came from Jeff Bezos himself. The same day as Lewis’s bizarre announcement of The Post’s non-endorsement, executives from Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, met with presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Lewis would like us to leave poor Bezos alone. Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft,” the CEO told CNN in the kind of statement that we in the business know as a non-denial denial. That is — it is a carefully worded recitation of things Bezos did not do. It doesn’t deny that Bezos made the call for no endorsement. And today, The New York Times’Ben Mullin reported that Bezos had expressed reservations about a presidential endorsement as early as September.

The blowback has been so intense that Bezos has taken it upon himself to explain the decision in The Washington Post. “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” he wrote. Instead, he claimed that it was “a principled decision.” That it was announced so close to the election was just a little whoopsy-doodle that Bezos claims was “inadequate planning.”

To back the decision, Bezos writes about the nosedive trust in media has taken. It is true that fewer people trust the media than before, but that may also be because people don’t necessarily know as many reporters anymore. In the days of healthy local journalism, reporters were your friends and neighbors, normal people that you interacted with on a regular basis at the grocery store. That is no longer the case; journalists are thin on the ground, and wildly outnumbered by PR people. Fox News, in particular, has gone out of its way to sow distrust. Dumping on other publications is a prime strategy for drumming up Substack subscriptions — just ask Bari Weiss.

But I don’t expect the founder of Amazon to know this history any more than I expect him to understand how to operate The Post’s CMS. And besides, the trust in media thing is a distraction. The op-ed is a clear attempt at damage control — an attempt to stop the bleeding. It is too little, and too late.

I suppose I should mention the various government contracts Bezos’s other businesses have — among them, Amazon’s $10 billion NSA contract and Blue Origin’s $3.4 billion NASA contract. Trump has previously targeted Bezos for The Washington Post’s reporting. A columnist who quit the Post over the decision, Robert Kagan, told CNN, “This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.” Kagan pointed to the business contracts as motivation.

Bezos would also like us to leave poor Bezos alone. “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” he wrote. “Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand.”

Bezos made his bones at Amazon by relentlessly focusing on customer satisfaction. Over and over, he told people to focus on making customers happy. Here’s a fun quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders:

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.

That’s probably good advice for running a business, and it appears to be advice neither Lewis nor Bezos himself took. By spiking a presidential endorsement, Bezos has created the appearance of a conflict of interest — and in journalism, that is as bad as an actual conflict of interest because now you’ve lost the trust of your audience.

(Lewis, though, is no stranger to journalism, since he does have experience as an editor. However, some of that experience is being investigated in the Sunday Times phone hacking scandal, so maybe he’s not the best person to consult on these matters.)

Still, if there is one thing Bezos is known for, it’s his cutthroat approach to capitalism. And here, he has failed at that, too. The customers have been speaking very clearly: NPR reports that three of the top 10 stories on the Post’s site Sunday were from staffers pissed off about the killed endorsement. The most-read was by the paper’s beloved humorist Alexandra Petri: “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” When I checked The Post’s site again today, the top two stories were about the controversy.

“Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice,” Bezos writes. This is true. It’s also why he shouldn’t have hired Will Lewis in the first place. A guy involved in a phone hacking scandal is simply not credible. Between Lewis and the pulled endorsement, it’s clear Bezos does not understand his customers. I wonder if he even understands credibility.

The blowback is bigger than The Post. One thing our tech overlords have been very unhappy about lately has been the government’s renewed approach to antitrust under Joe Biden. What the Post scandal highlights — besides Will Lewis’s incompetence — is exactly how many businesses Bezos owns, and how conflicts of interest could arise. He has skillfully drawn attention from normal citizens to overreaches of power in business. There is, of course, a solution: breaking up businesses that have gotten too big.

Well, I guess that’s a lesson for us all. This is what happens when you focus on yourself and not on the customers. Not only do they leave you in droves, but they may actually revile you enough to be politically dangerous.

Update, October 28th: Adds Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post op-ed explaining why he chose to shoot his own newspaper in the foot.