Religion may have declined, but our appetite for gurus remains insatiable.
Increasingly, people who need direction and advice have been looking to tech founders and CEOs. They are rich, of course — and most of us want to be rich — and they are thought to be especially insightful on the future.
Now, a tech founder or CEO might have good advice (and not just on fixing your computer). Successful people really can have useful insights on what it takes to succeed. People working on the cutting edge of innovation can have useful insights about the future of society. It would be silly and resentful to deny it.
But I think some people have been making a mistake in seeing tech leaders in quasi-religious terms, not just as interesting people but as an enlightened class. Simultaneously, tech people seem to have been dangerously emboldened by attention. They have started to believe that their every thought is infused with genius.
On the “Modern Wisdom” podcast, for example, Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList and prolific social media mind-blower, says he is above having demands on his time. He doesn’t just mean skipping meetings. (Why be rich if you can’t skip meetings?) <a href="https://x.com/liebert_2026/status/2079130384525295743">He means that he is</a>:
<blockquote>
… not expected to go to couples dinners &#8230; not expected to go to birthdays &#8230; not expected to go to weddings.
</blockquote>
Fun! To be fair, before we call Ravikant “Worst Husband of the Year,” he adds that the same applies to his wife. But this sort of Naval-gazing still dresses up borderline sociopathic behavior as spiritual insight. I’m sure all of us have gone to birthday parties or weddings with a slight feeling of resentment, but we still went for the sake of someone else. Try telling a close friend that skipping their wedding was a valuable exercise in “freeing up &#8230; time” and you’ll soon find yourself with a lot more time when you might have been seeing friends. And then what’s the point of having time at all?
I’m not sure Mr. Ravikant behaves like this in practice. But his words fit a pattern of tech founders and CEOs framing bizarre antisocial behavior as the key to productivity and efficiency. The more radically monomaniacal and hermetic people are, they seem to think, the more successful they will be.
“I’ve never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CTYPOkQG8Y">says Alex Karp of Palantir</a> when asked for the advice he would give young people. Now, I’m not denying that some ambitions demand a serious level of work-life imbalance. I’m a lowly opinion commentator — hardly someone who’ll be asked for advice from young people — and even I have spent a lot of sleepless nights miserably trying to finish columns. But does anybody think that Karp’s experiences are representative? Does anybody think you have to work on a Friday evening to be successful? Or did a lot of people in tech — like, in fairness, a lot of us outside of tech — not have a great social life at 20 to begin with?
The Twitter account “<a href="https://x.com/chasedownleads/status/2077549009380495425">Chase Passive Income</a>” is a fun satirical insight into the kind of LinkedIn-maddened perspective that this sort of pseudo-wisdom could encourage. “Spoke to 1,000 billionaires to learn how they got rich,” Chase <a href="https://x.com/chasedownleads/status/2077549009380495425">muses</a>:
<blockquote>
Here’s the shocking thing 
Not a single one of them said they got rich by attending their kid’s little league games 
Lesson learned. 
Never making that rookie mistake again.
</blockquote>
Again, I don’t disagree that achieving something exceptional sometimes takes exceptional behavior. At the very least, it takes very hard work. Stubbornly refusing to work weekends or in the evenings means it is almost impossible that you will win the Super Bowl, found a tech company, or even — sorry, “even” — become a doctor.
But this kind of extremism is unhelpful. In most cases, we simply don’t have to — and won’t be able to — work all the time in order to be successful. (No one could call Jeff Bezos a professional mediocrity, and the former Amazon boss has talked about his love of “<a href="https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/jeff-bezos-secret-to-a-clear-focused-mind-is-puttering-psychology-says-hes-on-to-something/91256882">puttering</a>.”) To suggest otherwise raises the question of what it even means to be successful. What is the point of “success” if you don’t have a social life? What is the point of “freeing up … time” if you don’t make time for a friend’s birthday? Personal success entails more than professional success. Sure, there will be exceptional cases. But exceptional cases definitionally make for bad advice.
It’s tempting to wonder if this kind of inhumane thinking has fuelled the development of inhumane technology — algorithms colonizing our consciousnesses, dating apps sucking the romance from our hearts, and AI slop drowning creativity.
This is a bit unfair. No one forces us at gunpoint to download an app. Technology develops as it does because it meets demand, even if it isn’t the healthiest form of demand. That said, I think tech leaders should sometimes reflect on what their work is actually achieving. They might not need work-life balance, and that’s morbidly impressive, but we really do have to balance technological progress with civilized societal existence. Even if that sometimes means going to a wedding.
***
Ben Sixsmith is the Online Editor at The Critic.

US-IT-APPLE-NEWS-FEED

Silicon Valley’s Sociopathic Saints

Alex karp

DW Opinion

Jeff Bezos

Naval Ravikant

Silicon Valley

tech bros

Elon Musk&#8217;s SpaceX IPO will undoubtedly be the biggest IPO in history. 
What&#8217;s unusual about this particular IPO is that it is widely available to retail investors, such as the man on the street. Typically, in any IPO, a certain percentage of the company&#8217;s stock is offered to the public, and a large percentage of that stock is already pre-purchased by institutional investors.
The pre-market valuation of the IPO is likely to be in the $1.77 trillion range, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That is not a bad thing. It is an amazing thing. But you are going to hear from all the wrong people that it&#8217;s immoral, terrible, even evil. Why?
Envy. It&#8217;s a universal human emotion, and envy is bad and wrong, and God explicitly condemns it.
What could destroy the country and the global economy is what has always threatened humanity: Envy.
Jimmy Kimmel is a beautiful example of this. Jimmy Kimmel is a multimillionaire who works for billionaires, and he&#8217;s upset about a prospective trillionaire.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/the-ben-shapiro-show-ep-2444?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Kimmel is an obnoxious, non-funny, woke pope of late-night TV, who&#8217;s probably worth somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. He is paid by people worth tens of billions of dollars to complain about a guy who built a company that would be worth $1.77 trillion.
Kimmel mocked:
<blockquote>Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner, and he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire. Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past three years. You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing from us, sure seems like an immigrant who&#8217;s been stealing from us, to me.</blockquote>
This is just obnoxious trash. It is not true. Elon did not, in fact, grow up wealthy. His dad was kind of a mess. And as far as the idea that Elon came to the United States wealthy, that is eminently untrue. He was living in some of the worst apartments in America when he came here. And then he didn&#8217;t get a job at Netscape despite applying. And then he ended up becoming this unbelievable success.
The notion that he is stealing from Americans by building several of the most successful companies in American history is totally crazy.
What has Jimmy Kimmel built? Ever?
But here&#8217;s what&#8217;s really going on: Jimmy Kimmel doesn&#8217;t like that Elon is really, really, really rich.
Kimmel continued:
<blockquote>Trillion dollars. It&#8217;s hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know a trillion is a number, but it&#8217;s so large. In the same way, we can&#8217;t fathom it the same way. We know, like Elon has a lot of kids when we can&#8217;t fathom him getting laid, right? So let me try to illustrate it. If you tried to count out loud to a trillion, you would be counting until the year 33,736. $1 trillion is 10 billion $100 bills.</blockquote>
I&#8217;m just wondering: Jimmy Kimmel is worth probably $100 million. If you counted to 100 million, it would take you about 3 years, if you counted one number per second and stayed up all night.
Why the envy, why the rage?
There’s certainly something political to it. Jimmy Kimmel was much nicer to Elon Musk back in 2013 when he had him on his show to talk about SpaceX.
He said to Musk:
<blockquote>You know, I want to go over some of your many accomplishments just for the audience in case they&#8217;re not familiar with them. In 1983, at age 12, you designed a video game and sold it to a computer magazine for $500. 1995, you quit the graduate program at Stanford to found Zip2. In 1999, you sold Zip2 to Compaq for $309 million.
You co-founded PayPal in 2000. You sold PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars. You founded Space-X. You co-founded Tesla Motors. You helped create SolarCity, the solar power company. Well, it&#8217;s great to meet you. If you want to watch the launch, why wouldn&#8217;t you want to watch the launch of the Space-x rocket? On March 1 go to Space X.com and take a look.</blockquote>
Barack Obama toured SpaceX with Elon in 2010. The Democratic president of the United States marveled at it.
Musk was talking about reusable rockets back in 2010. That was not achieved for over half a decade. It was an enormous risk. And Obama was marveling at it at the time.
But now we&#8217;ve gone from that inspirational view to giant inflatable Elon Musks in Times Square with no shirt on and looking ugly.
What&#8217;s really going on here?
The answer is very simple: Envy.
There is a very interesting study in the journal &#8220;Frontiers in Psychology&#8221; from 2021 that discusses what are called “the two faces of envy.” The authors <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8578062/">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>Envy is like a wildfire destroying people. We feel envy for, a classmate who gets a good grade or, a neighbor who buys an expensive car. This kind of emotion drives our different behaviors, like small stones in the heart lake, ruining our peace of mind. &#8230; [Scholars] envy as “the intense, unpleasant feeling that one feels when one realizes that another has something that one strives for, pursues, or yearns for.” Envy is a painful emotion.</blockquote>
There are two kinds of envy. One is useful, and one is quite terrible.
One is benign envy: “The envious person may try to make themselves as good as the person being envied. Therefore, envy can increase personal effort, drive behavior to achieve the desired object, and to turn attention to the means of achieving it.”
And then there&#8217;s another type: malicious envy. This is where “The envious person may try to degrade the person being envied, to vilify or denigrate the other person&#8217;s advantages. Envy can increase schadenfreude behavior that leads to hostility and resentment. It can shift attention to the person being envied.”
By the way, it also leads to violence. There&#8217;s literally a full commandment among the Ten Commandments that is directly about envy: “You shall not covet your neighbor&#8217;s house, your neighbor&#8217;s wife, his servant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor&#8217;s.”
God takes the time to say envy is bad.
By the way, this is the only commandment that has to do with your feelings. All the rest are behaviorally driven: Don&#8217;t steal. Don&#8217;t kill, don&#8217;t blaspheme. Respect your parents and everyone else. This one is emotional. Why did God reserve one commandment for the emotion of envy?
Because it turns out the entire history of humanity relies on whether we can actually master our envy. This is the story of Cain and Abel. The story of Cain and Abel is about envy. Cain decides to sacrifice to God, and Abel follows suit. And God, for reasons we don&#8217;t understand from the Bible, accepts Abel’s sacrifice, but not Cain&#8217;s.
And then God says, “Surely if you do right, you will be uplifted. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at your door. Its urge is toward you, but you can be its master.”
What is that sin? It&#8217;s envy. And what does Cain do? Instead of going to Abel and saying, “What did you do right and I did wrong? How can I do better?” he kills Abel.
Envy is destructive. It is terrible.
What&#8217;s interesting here is when we get envious, because it&#8217;s not a universal timing thing; it&#8217;s a universal human emotion, we feel it all the time.
But it tends to kick in for anyone who&#8217;s just above you on the wealth index. So if you make 100 grand, you may be envious of the guy who makes 200 grand.
But it&#8217;s not every person who makes more than you.
There is a particular envy for people who take risks.
That’s because in our heart of hearts, we think we could have done that too. We look at Elon, we say, “I could have founded a SpaceX company. He thought of it, but I could have thought of it. I could have taken the risk. It&#8217;s something that&#8217;s within my purview.”
It&#8217;s really, really interesting to watch New Yorkers who just voted for a Democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani, who riffs on Citadel CEO Ken Griffin all day long and roots for the Knicks this season. The Knicks are super rich. Really, really, really rich. Karl-Anthony Towns made $53 million this year. OG Anunoby made $40 million. Jalen Brunson makes $35 million a year. That is a lot of money.
But you&#8217;re not seeing jealousy or outrage in the stadium. People aren&#8217;t showing up and yelling at them about how they need to redistribute their income and pay more taxes, and how many school teachers are out of a job, and do we need more government-sponsored grocery stores.
So why are people so envious of these guys? Because everyone recognizes that these guys have unique talents given by God. You&#8217;re not seven feet, you&#8217;re not 270 pounds, and you can&#8217;t shoot the three.
But when it’s a smart person who doesn&#8217;t have exceptional physical qualities, then we get pretty jealous. “Why didn&#8217;t we get what he has? Why don&#8217;t we all get to be Elon Musk-rich? He&#8217;s not that much better than we are.”
But here is the thing. The reason that Elon is super-rich — and I know a lot of people who are as bright as Elon, I know a lot of very high IQ people, and Elon has a very high IQ, he is much richer than any of them — is because he took risks, huge risks, unprecedented risks.
And that is good because risk is what creates innovation. If you don&#8217;t have people risking, you don&#8217;t get better stuff. If you don&#8217;t have people taking out mortgages on their homes to sponsor and subsidize them, a company won&#8217;t get built.
If you don&#8217;t have people willing to put their own money where their mouth is, their own time, their own effort, you do not get new things.
We need new things. Not only that, we need a system that allows you to keep what you make.
For every single Elon Musk in any industry, there are 10,000 dudes who thought of it, risked it, and failed.
What is the only thing that will keep people risking it and trying to do the thing that actually builds? The only thing that incentivizes that is the possibility of making a lot of money.
That’s what generates people willing to take the risks that actually make the world a better place.
Risk-taking is risky. Take, for example, Blue Origin, run by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, a competitor to SpaceX. A couple of weeks ago, we watched a Blue Origin rocket explode on the ground. Billions of dollars were lost in one millisecond.
That’s what it looks like when you take risks, because sometimes you fail. You know how many videos there are of Elon Musk&#8217;s rockets blowing up on the launch pad?
How do you incentivize a person to keep looking failure in the face over and over and over again? You have to have an American system, a free-market system that rewards risk-taking and punishes failure and rewards success.
That is what you require. People forget that Elon Musk risked pretty much his entire early fortune on SpaceX and Tesla.
This is risk-taking, and it&#8217;s awesome, and it should be rewarded.
No matter what Jimmy Kimmel thinks.

spacex_envy

The Sin Fueling America’s War On Success

Ben Shapiro

Elon Musk

Envy

Jimmy Kimmel

Opinion

SpaceX

A Blue Origin rocket exploded Thursday night in Florida, causing immense damage to its billion-dollar launch pad and complicating NASA’s plans to build a base on the moon. 
The explosion rocked Blue Origin’s launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as the space company ran a ground test on one of its rockets. The cause of the explosion has not yet been determined. 
“We experienced an anomaly during today&#8217;s hotfire test. All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more,” Blue Origin said on social media. 
Videos posted online showed a rocket sitting on the launch pad before becoming completely engulfed in flames after a massive explosion. 
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Nuclear explosion? No, it&#039;s Jeff Bezos&#039; rocket." width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ihV6PjqA8Dw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin, said it was too early to know what prompted the explosion. 
“All personnel are accounted for and safe. It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” Bezos <a href="https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/2060182822170902622">said</a>. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”
“Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly,” said Elon Musk, who runs the rival space exploration company SpaceX. 
&#8220;Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard,&#8221; Musk added.
Blue Origin was preparing to send out 48 low-Earth orbit satellites <a href="https://x.com/Amazonleo/status/2059677904296919106">used</a> by Amazon Leo, a high-speed internet provider rival of Musk&#8217;s Starlink. The satellites were set to be carried out by Blue Origin&#8217;s New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift rocket designed to be reusable. The rocket was <a href="https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn">named</a> after American astronaut John Glenn. 
The explosion did extensive damage to Blue Origin’s Launch Complex 36. The launch complex cost more $1 billion to build and was completed in 2021. Costs from New Glenn have been estimated to be around $68 million per launch, <a href="https://spaceinsider.tech/2025/01/10/new-glenn-vs-starship-a-detailed-comparison-in-2025">according</a> to Space Insider. 
Space Force issued a statement on Thursday warning the public that debris from the explosion may wash up on the shores in the next few days and weeks. It warned people not to touch the materials, but alert the authorities. 
The explosion could impact NASA plans for space exploration as Blue Origin was set to be involved in transporting NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon out of lunar orbit. NASA is <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iii/">supposed</a> to test its spacecraft integration with landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX for the Artemis III mission. 
“Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult,” <a href="https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2060186268772835475">said</a> NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. “We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets. We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”

MixCollage-29-May-2026-07-12-AM-9643

Bezos-Owned Rocket Explodes, And It Looks Like A Nuclear Bomb Went Off

Blue Origin

NASA

Is one of the richest men in the world turning into the next Elon?
In an interview last week, Jeff Bezos went full populist, arguing for slashing government spending and government control, and ending all taxes for anyone who makes under $75,000.
He praised President Donald Trump as &#8220;mature and disciplined,” framing support for the president as being &#8220;on the side of America,&#8221; and giving a full-throated endorsement of capitalism versus socialism.
Now, Bezos has been moving in this direction for a while; he was rabidly anti-Trump in his first term but has since warmed not just to the president, but to populism.
He already moved to Florida for the taxes. Last year, he announced the Washington Post, which he owns, would henceforth advocate &#8220;free markets and individual liberties&#8221; as opposed to the communist Deep State the Post used to advocate.
He infuriated the Post’s liberal readers by refusing to endorse anyone in the 2024 election — which they took as a rebuke of Kamala.
This is all risky in Silicon Valley, where saying nice things about Trump can end your career and certainly end the dinner-party invites. But being worth more than $200 billion gives you some leeway.
And it matters because it would be splendid to have another Elon Musk.
Bezos kicked off his interview by correctly noting that we&#8217;ve got two economies — some call it a K-shaped economy — with lots of people doing great but millions suffering.
But the kicker is that, unlike socialists who want more government control — and more taxes — Bezos wants less.
He would start by ending taxes on anybody making less than $75,000 a year, which would cost shockingly little, just 3% of federal revenue. He rejects hiking taxes on billionaires to cover it — as you&#8217;d expect — saying the government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Then he went after that spending side, with its regulations and crony handouts.
Bezos cited housing, where federal policy drives up prices through mortgage subsidies while strangling supply with zoning and building regulations.
And education, noting New York schools spend $44,000 per student, yet half of the pupils would require remedial courses to go to college.
And crony capitalism, citing the 10,000-page tax code lovingly bought by corporate lobbyists and the billions Washington hands to corporations.
He didn&#8217;t get into the non-governmental organization industrial complex that siphons your life savings to Left-wing rioters and “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/minneapolis-quality-learing-center-is-officially-closed-state-records-show">Learing Centers</a>,” but he did note that for-profit businesses do much more for the world than most charities.
After all, to build a successful business, you must make people&#8217;s lives better, whether it&#8217;s McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, or SpaceX. But to build a successful charity, you have to grab enough money and not fix the problem — that would cause your donations to dry up.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Jeff Bezos: &#8220;If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/3svJ1onmAr">pic.twitter.com/3svJ1onmAr</a>
— CNBC (@CNBC) <a href="https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/2057085086504218722?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 20, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Bezos is now the latest convert to the Elon bundle — free enterprise, small government, less corruption, and less government control.
Dozens of billionaires — many formerly Left-wing — have now come on-side, including internet pioneer Marc Andreessen, who was terrified by government control of AI, Larry Ellison, who just bought Paramount and CNBC, and a dozen others who worry more about the economy than pronouns.
We&#8217;ll see if Bezos gets as hands-on as Elon. But it&#8217;s encouraging that billionaires are finally turning against the communists who would hang them from a lamp-post.
***
Peter St. Onge, Ph.D., is a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Jeff Bezos Chooses Capitalism

Economy

Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos blasted New York City’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, saying that if the corporate giant operated like the Big Apple’s broken public school system, customers wouldn&#8217;t see their packages for well over a month.
In a scathing <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/cnbc-exclusive-transcript-jeff-bezos-speaks-with-cnbcs-andrew-ross-sorkin-on-squawk-box-today-.html">televised sit-down</a> on CNBC, the high-flying billionaire unloaded on Mamdani over a record-breaking $44 billion education budget that has yielded nothing but abysmal returns. Bezos slammed the city for blowing an astronomical $44,000 annually per student — outspending rivals like Los Angeles and Chicago by roughly 30% — even as student numbers plunge and exam performance craters.
&#8220;If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system &#8230; your packages would take six weeks to arrive,&#8221; the e-commerce kingpin told anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin from a Blue Origin factory floor. &#8220;We’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee. And then when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway.&#8221;
The tech titan, boasting a jaw-dropping $269 billion net worth, hit back hard at Mamdani&#8217;s obsession with soaking the rich. Bezos insisted that doubling his own hefty tax bill would do absolutely nothing to support frontline educators, because the massive mountain of cash is swallowed whole by a bloated, management-heavy bureaucracy.
&#8220;None of this money is getting to the teachers, I promise you,&#8221; Bezos said, targeting the army of middle managers choking the system.
Mamdani couldn&#8217;t wait to clap back, taking to X to snap: &#8220;I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ. <a href="https://t.co/JEnRnM2xII">https://t.co/JEnRnM2xII</a>
&mdash; Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) <a href="https://twitter.com/NYCMayor/status/2057137240904511564?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 20, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The fiery clash erupted shortly after the Bezos Family Foundation <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/05/20/us-news/jeff-bezos-torches-mamdani-for-pouring-43b-into-mismanaged-nyc-schools/">pledged</a> up to $150 million toward early childhood programs across Gotham via a massive anti-poverty endowment. Meanwhile, the struggling mayor has managed to scrape together a pitiful $3.5 million toward his own heavily hyped $20 million childcare fund.
The 62-year-old mogul, who was raised by a teenage mother and a young Cuban immigrant, argued that clueless politicians constantly look to manufacture wealthy villains instead of fixing real operational messes. Rather than finger-pointing, Bezos urged leaders to look at systemic tax reform. His pitch? Wipe out the tax bills entirely for lower-income working-class families, including struggling local nurses.
&#8220;When people are starting out and they’re struggling, stop taxing them. We don’t need it,&#8221; Bezos concluded. &#8220;I don’t want to reduce it; I want to eliminate it.&#8221;

2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Mark Guiducci – Arrivals

Jeff Bezos Humiliates NYC’s Socialist Mayor

Amazon

New York City

Schools

Taxes

Zohran Mamdani

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Actress Sarah Paulson <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-met-galas-dumbest-political-stunts">stepped</a> onto the Met Gala carpet on the traditional first Monday of May wearing an oversized U.S. dollar eye mask with holes poked into it so she could see if we got her tone-deaf smoke signal. As cult-favorite designer Matières Fécales described it on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DX8EF__gk3q/?img_index=2">Instagram</a>: “She is wearing the ‘Blinded by Money’ leather mask and the Destroyed Tulle Debutante Ballgown … A reflection of the greed and corruption that comes with extreme power.”
So, whose greed and corrupt power was being reflected? Paulson’s? Was she blinded by her own oversized dollar? Let’s just say, the message didn’t quite have the intended effect.
“The only way to deliver this statement earnestly would be by not going,” posted one <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DX8EF__gk3q/?img_index=2">commenter</a> about Paulson’s rebellion against an event she probably had marked on her calendar for a year and paid <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-much-met-gala-ticket-2026/">$100,000</a> to attend. 
“This is literally the Capitol from ‘The Hunger Games,’” posted one <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DX7-TlDiNT9/?img_index=4">Instagram</a> user, with others suggesting a guillotine might have added that special something.
 
<div id="attachment_1089531" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1089531" class="wp-image-1089531 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-2274057518-864x576.jpg" alt="US actress Sarah Paulson arrives for the 2026 Met Gala celebrating &quot;Costume Art&quot; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, on May 4, 2026." width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-2274057518-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-2274057518-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-2274057518-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-2274057518.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images</div>
Paulson wasn’t the richest person in the room. (That was probably honorary chairman <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/jeff-bezos-snuck-into-the-met-gala.html">Jeff Bezos</a>, who donated $10 million to the cause from his <a href="https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/">$282 billion</a> coffers.) Maybe the actor was just throwing a tantrum about her own measly <a href="https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors/sarah-paulson-net-worth/">$12 million</a> net worth. Showing up in an $8,000 look from a designer whose name translates to “fecal matter” sure set the tone for the rest of the night, as <a href="https://translate.google.com/?hl=en&amp;sl=auto&amp;tl=fr&amp;text=fecal%20matter&amp;op=translate">matière fécale</a> hit the fan in style.
With a few friends or a corporate card, you could reserve a table for <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-much-met-gala-ticket-2026/">$350,000</a>. Maybe fashion houses used to pick up that kind of tab during the Gala’s golden era, but in 2026, with Amazon, Spotify, Meta, OpenAI, and Snapchat shelling out for the best seats, the Met Gala bested last year’s $31 million haul, raking in a record <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/met-gala-record-42-million-silicon-valley-jeff-bezos/">$42 million</a>. 
Clearly, <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/05/04/lifestyle/met-gala-urine-bottle-protest-targets-jeff-bezos/?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=nypost&amp;utm_medium=social">bottles of fake “urine”</a> hidden inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art ahead of the event, alerting Met staffers to the alleged working conditions of Amazon delivery drivers, where workers are forced to use empty water bottles in lieu of breaks, did nothing to sway revelers.
As stunt perpetrator Everyone Hates Elon posted to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DX1iP3CCLL-/?img_index=1">Instagram</a>, “Jeff Bezos&#8217; company Amazon is literally being sued for forcing workers to urinate in bottles. Amazon avoids MILLIONS in tax and Bezos is one of the world&#8217;s richest men. The Met Museum is taking the P*SS by having Jeff honored as their Gala host.”
Moving on from bathroom topics, the dress code for the night was “Fashion As Art,” which was interpreted like a game of telephone where nothing made sense by the end. Some seemingly tried to pull off tributes to <a href="https://x.com/ModernGurlzz/status/2051504522841710620/photo/1">actual works</a> of fine art (Apologies to Georges Seurat, Jackson Pollock, Gustav Klimt, et al.), but others took inspiration from left field. 
<a href="https://variety.com/2026/music/news/bad-bunny-met-gala-old-man-1236737691/">Bad Bunny</a> transformed into a wrinkly, sun-spotted elderly man with a cane. <a href="https://www.eonline.com/news/1431643/met-gala-2026-cardi-b-has-fever-reveals-shes-sick">Cardi B</a> arrived in an awkwardly lumpy Marc Jacobs look; she should probably get checked out by a doctor. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DX7s8aZhEjt/">Lena Dunham</a> looked as “Famesick” as her latest memoir in blood-red, feathered <a href="https://people.com/lena-dunham-sparkles-over-the-top-sequin-dress-met-gala-2026-11966511">Valentino</a>. 
Simulated nudity was “art” for everyone from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DX9qxRgDfJb/?img_index=5">Kendall</a> and Kylie Jenner, whose matching bodices boasted prosthetic nipples, to <a href="https://www.elle.com/fashion/celebrity-style/a71204460/best-naked-dresses-met-gala-2026-photos/">Kim Kardashian</a> in an orange fembot look and Hailey Bieber with a gilded torso. Naked-look dresses were strategically worn by Gigi Hadid, Zoë Kravitz, and Irina Shayk. Celebrated trans model Alex Consani just showed his actual nipples in a see-through corset.
Don’t forget about the alleged abusers flitting about. Katy Perry may have been dressed like she’s qualifying in astronaut fencing for the next Olympics, but her all-white <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/katy-perry-met-gala-2026-stella-mccartney#:~:text=This%20year's%20%E2%80%9CCostume%20Art%E2%80%9D%20theme,representative%20for%20Perry%20told%20Vogue.">Stella McCartney</a> was stained by recent <a href="https://www.complex.com/style/a/abel-shifferaw/katy-perry-astronaut-mask-met-gala-2026">assault accusations by Ruby Rose</a>. All of us rolled our eyes at <a href="https://pagesix.com/2026/05/05/celebrity-news/blake-livelys-met-gala-2026-entourage-post-justin-baldoni-settlement-included-her-family-member/">Blake Lively</a> showing up in frothy sherbet Versace without a care in the world — the same day she settled her attempted two-year-long legal takedown of Justin Baldoni. 
Per Met Gala rules, <a href="https://www.eonline.com/news/1431657/met-gala-2026-how-beyonce-nicole-kidman-broke-rules-brought-daughters">guests must be 18</a> to walk the carpet. You could frame Beyoncé’s 14-year-old daughter Blue Ivy and Nicole Kidman’s 17-year-old daughter Sunday Rose tagging along with their moms like a dress-up version of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. But just like they say, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Good_Happens_After_2_A.M.#:~:text=Nothing%20Good%20Happens%20After%202,to%20you%2C%20please%20give%20today.">nothing good happens after 2 a.m.</a>,” nothing good happens when you’re hanging around <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DX7zFNupFsm/">Sam Smith</a> looking like “<a href="https://genius.com/Sam-smith-and-kim-petras-unholy-lyrics">something unholy</a>” in Christian Cowan. 
If you ignored all of the guests, you might be able to enjoy Broadway star Joshua Henry’s joyful show-opening performance of Whitney Houston’s “<a href="https://youtu.be/hCjBNYbN_1I?t=265">I Wanna Dance With Somebody</a>.” (Look away from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DX7oyzMDixR/">Anna Wintour clapping to her own beat</a> like an off-balance flamingo in sunglasses.)
To shed some light on the ballooning opulence of the most elite costume party you’ve never been invited to, the first-ever Met Gala in <a href="https://time.com/6972918/met-gala-history/">1948 cost just $50</a> per ticket and was meant to raise funds for the Costume Institute’s latest annual exhibit. Today, the Gala remains the museum’s <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/departments/the-costume-institute">main cash cow</a>.
But with all the fanfare outside the gallery walls, you might not even realize what treasures await a museumgoer once he walks through the door. Starting May 10, you’re invited to look past the Ozempic waifs of the Gala and feast your eyes upon the “Costume Art” exhibit designed to “<a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/entertainment/the-scene/met-gala/met-gala-fashion-exhibit-reclaim-body-types-art-history/6497579/">reclaim the body</a>.”
If, as celebrity gossip journalist Rob Shuter alleges, the jet set didn’t zip out the back door immediately after getting that red-carpet shot, fame-starved glitterati could peruse a collection of fashion for “<a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/entertainment/the-scene/met-gala/met-gala-fashion-exhibit-reclaim-body-types-art-history/6497579/">the corpulent body. The disabled body. The pregnant body. The aging body</a>.” You, too, can go look at a high-end designer’s “body-positive” idea of yourself for <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/plan-your-visit?utm_source=google&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_campaign=&amp;utm_term=&amp;utm_content=39536&amp;mkwid=s&amp;pcrid=610449093567&amp;pmt=&amp;pkw=&amp;pdv=c&amp;slid=&amp;product=&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=14507362235&amp;gbraid=0AAAAADmlGN7Wdo1ZgqV1drBVCivyYUPqi&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjwqubPBhBOEiwAzgZX2jpdaTfmR-CCINU2O4WClqHxD8dJ8ovlk3_2elv1YhEhXl90ADha1RoCj18QAvD_BwE">$30</a>.
If the museum has even a shred of artistic sensibility left in its creative department, there will be souvenir keychain bottles of yellow liquid labeled “Met Gala &#8217;26” available in the gift shop for $99 — a smug shout-out to us 99%. 
As <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUyNTUwF24H/">Chloe Malle</a> finds her footing as Vogue’s new head of editorial, and the Met Gala gets “Bezos-ed,” we wonder how many years this bloated behemoth has left. Should we humanely put her out to pasture, or pull the plug on fashion’s hottest mess?
Livestream co-host and model <a href="https://youtu.be/hCjBNYbN_1I?t=473">Cara Delevingne</a> remarked, “Holy moly, what a show. Aren’t we lucky to witness that?” Lucky isn&#8217;t the word I would choose.

The 2026 Met Gala Celebrating “Costume Art” – Inside

Fake Urine, ‘Famesick’ Celebs, And $100k Tickets: Inside The Grotesque Hypocrisy Of The Met Gala

Fashion

Met Gala

Upstream

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Blue Origin Sent Celebs Up For Minutes. They Came Back With Astronaut Egos.

Gayle King

Katy Perry

lauren sanchez

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The era of the &#8220;paper of record&#8221; is officially dead, and the bank statements at 1301 K Street have the receipts to prove it.
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The Washington Post, the crown jewel of the billionaire-funded activist press, reportedly hemorrhaged more than $100 million in 2025, according to a report from <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-losses-topped-100-million-in-2025-85076aae">The Wall Street Journal</a>.
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This staggering deficit follows a $100 million loss the previous year, and a $77 million loss in 2023, highlighting a catastrophic downward spiral for the Jeff Bezos-owned outlet that has failed to find a pulse in the modern media landscape.
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The financial bloodbath has already triggered a &#8220;painful&#8221; restructuring, with the Post slashing its staff by a massive 30% earlier this month. In a candid internal meeting held Wednesday, acting CEO Jeff D’Onofrio and Executive Editor Matt Murray laid bare the dysfunction. D&#8217;Onofrio revealed that while newsroom costs surged 16% over the last five years, productivity cratered; the number of stories published by the outlet has plummeted by 42% since 2020.
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“We’re not a paper of record; there’s no such thing anymore in today’s world,” Murray told the shell-shocked newsroom, a stunning admission of defeat for a publication that once lived by the self-important slogan &#8220;Democracy Dies in Darkness.&#8221;
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The financial ruin comes amid a total collapse of the Post’s internal leadership. Just weeks ago, CEO Will Lewis abruptly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/washington-post-ceo-steps-down-days-after-mass-layoffs">stepped down</a>, claiming he wanted to ensure a &#8220;sustainable future&#8221; for the company. His departure followed a brutal year of buyouts and resignations.
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The Post has been &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/absolute-exodus-washington-post-bleeds-talent-as-experienced-staffers-take-buyout">bleeding talent</a>,&#8221; as veteran liberals—including columnists Jennifer Rubin and Jonathan Capehart—fled the building. Many of these exits were prompted by Bezos’ attempts to steer the paper back toward &#8220;timeless American values&#8221; and &#8220;personal liberties,&#8221; a move that reportedly infuriated a newsroom more accustomed to acting as a megaphone for the D.C. establishment than a balanced news source.
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As the Post struggles to remain solvent, its desperate pivot to technology has only worsened its credibility crisis. The recent launch of &#8220;Your Personal Podcast,&#8221; a customizable AI-generated audio tool, turned into an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-washington-posts-ai-podcast-rollout-has-been-a-train-wreck">unmitigated disaster</a>. The AI began &#8220;spitting out fake quotes&#8221; and inventing commentary, forcing editors to scramble to fix errors delivered at scale.
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Internal communications showed editors were &#8220;infuriated&#8221; by the botched rollout, which occurred just as the Trump administration intensified its criticism of the outlet as a top &#8220;media offender.&#8221;
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The Post’s reporting has also faced embarrassing public rebuttals from the Pentagon. Earlier this year, the paper published a widely circulated hit piece on War Secretary Pete Hegseth, alleging he gave a &#8220;kill them all&#8221; order during a naval operation. The report was swiftly and flatly refuted by Navy Admiral Mitch Bradley, who told Congress the order was never given, exposing the Post’s reliance on &#8220;anonymous sources&#8221; to push partisan narratives.
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With sports departments shuttered and international bureaus shrinking, the Post is now attempting to reinvent itself as a lean, national-focused outlet. But as the &#8220;exodus&#8221; of both readers and writers continues, it remains to be seen if even the deep pockets of the Amazon founder can save a legacy institution that has effectively alienated half of its potential audience.
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Washington Post Logo

DEATH OF A LEGACY: The Washington Post Hemorrhages $100M+

Legacy Media

Media

U.S.

Washington Post

The CEO of The Washington Post has stepped down days after the media company cut roughly 30% of its staff.
The Post announced publisher Will Lewis’ departure on Saturday. Lewis also wrote a short note to staff in which he explained that he was leaving “to ensure” a “sustainable future” for the media outlet.
“After two years of transformation at The Washington Post, now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis wrote, according to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/07/media/washington-post-will-lewis-publisher-resigns">CNN</a>. “I want to thank Jeff Bezos for his support and leadership throughout my tenure as CEO and Publisher. The institution could not have a better owner.”
“During my tenure, difficult decisions have been taken in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post so it can for many years ahead publish high-quality nonpartisan news to millions of customers each day,” he concluded.
Lewis joined The Washington Post in 2024, brought on board by Bezos to help turn the outlet around after years of shrinking readership and financial losses. Jeff D’Onofrio, the Post’s chief financial officer, will succeed Lewis in the interim.
Post owner Jeff Bezos also wrote a note included in the release announcing the change. The Amazon founder said that The Washington Post has “an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity,” according to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/washington-post-owner-jeff-bezos-gives-first-statement-after-layoffs-2026-2">Business Insider</a>.
&#8220;Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” Bezos said.
The Post made major changes this week to reverse its trajectory, cutting roughly 300 jobs as it seeks to strip away parts of the company that it sees as financial liabilities and focus resources on profitable areas. Executives at the company said that the outlet has failed to adapt to a changing media landscape and must make tough decisions to stay relevant and competitive.
“If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition,” executive editor Matt Murray wrote in a note to staff on Wednesday amid the layoffs.
The major cuts came to the newsroom’s international reporting and sports department, which no longer exists. Some of the sports writers were folded into the features section of the paper. The paper shrunk its international coverage, but will keep reporters on the ground in about a dozen countries.
The Post is also restructuring its metro section and shutting down its Post Reports podcast. The outlet will focus on national news, investigations, and health and wellness.
“Today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what has become a more crowded, competitive, and complicated media landscape,” Murray said during a call with staff on Wednesday. “For too long, we&#8217;ve operated with a structure that’s too rooted in the days when we were a quasi-monopoly local newspaper.”

The Washington Post

Washington Post CEO Steps Down Days After Mass Layoffs

Journalism

Tragedy occurred in the Bezos universe yesterday when 16,000 people were cut from Amazon.
The first round of cuts in October led to roughly 14,000 white-collar employees receiving pink slips. People in the world of journalism were deeply affected. They were really upset that tens of thousands of people were about to lose their jobs at Amazon, one of the most successful companies in America and in the world.
Just kidding.
They didn&#8217;t care.
They barely covered that; it lasted in the news cycle for about five seconds.
What they are really, really upset about in the Bezos universe is that The Washington Post is going to lay off one-third of its staff. The Washington Post is cutting — wait for it — 300+ jobs.
I&#8217;m just going to point out where the sympathies lie. 30,000 people lose their jobs at Amazon because Amazon is cost-cutting and reevaluating thanks to AI, and journalists respond, “You know, those are people who work in Amazon. Those might be factory workers, those might be middle management. They&#8217;re not us.”
But at The Washington Post, they laid off the third-string journalist in Gaza, who may or may not be a contractor for Hamas; they laid off the race and ethnicity reporter, and it’s “My God, the American promise has been sullied and violated! No, this cannot be!”
The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-layoffs-feburary-2026-c105b237?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=AWEtsqcaQNca6RrDYdMgDke2Qwu1pfAhNcuwCLeGw2gtfcyFA6ZnY6MoI_3SOtNXZjo%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6984dc53&amp;gaa_sig=APDqepx-qArXwdbgE1oFZKF_NO-7qs9L1QsLikbvbByoXzZcBaTeCL6ss9lDG47LXXcfxAiG6I1p2ATcf6q7Uw%3D%3D">reported</a>:
<blockquote>The Washington Post is cutting one-third of its staff, slashing hundreds of jobs across the newsroom and other departments in an effort to trim costs and reshape coverage.
The layoffs will affect journalists in nearly all news departments, including the sports, foreign, technology and breaking-news teams, as well as business and technology staff. 
“If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition,” Executive Editor Matt Murray wrote in a note to newsroom staff Wednesday&#8230;. The Post is closing its sports department in its current form but will retain some roles in that coverage area. It is shrinking its international coverage, and will focus on national news and features, investigations and advice on health and wellness topics.
Murray said the Post will continue to have correspondents in about a dozen international locations, and will focus on issues related to national security. “That’s what our readers seem to respond to the most,” he said. &#8230; The Post lost $77 million in 2023 and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-challenges-trump-second-term-61ea6ed9?mod=article_inline">$100 million in 2024</a>, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, as it contended with traffic declines from sources including Google and Facebook. &#8230; In recent weeks, Post journalists—including foreign correspondents, local-news reporters and members of the White House team—made public pleas asking the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to maintain their jobs.</blockquote>
The Washington Post, like the Daily Wire, is not a nonprofit. If journalists wish to start their own nonprofit and get a bunch of left-wing funders to put millions of dollars behind their jobs, they are free to do that. There are organizations that operate as charitable organizations that do active journalism on occasion.
But the idea that Jeff Bezos owes it to the employees of The Washington Post to maintain their jobs when the paper is losing money is crazy and stupid.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2362-left-wing-journalists-panic-as-wa-po-fires-300?elementPosition=5&amp;row=6&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Nonetheless, the response from the media ecosystem is absolute shock and horror. Emmanuel Felton, the race and ethnicity reporter at The Washington Post — the race and ethnicity reporter? Is there breaking news in the race and ethnicity area? Is evolution suddenly occurring that you need l a reporter on race and ethnicity? How is that a coverage area? If on the Right there was a race and ethnicity reporter, we would recognize just how racist that is — put out a statement:
<blockquote>I&#8217;m among the hundreds of people laid off by The Post. This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn&#8217;t a financial decision, it was an ideological one. The other reporter on my team covering race was also laid off as well as the editor in charge of race coverage across national. The team covering America beyond DC is now 90% white.</blockquote>
Oh, no. You mean that people covering issues are going to do so without regard to the race of the reporter?
We can&#8217;t have that.
“Racism,” says the guy who gets paid to talk about racism all day long.
Brianna Tucker, national politics breaking news reporter and the National Association of Black Journalists political task force chair, put out a statement saying, “I&#8217;m affected by layoffs at the Washington Post today. There aren&#8217;t enough words to describe the immense privilege and profound responsibility I&#8217;ve felt since hired at 25 as an editor. As a Black woman covering politics, (a dwindling cohort) today, that feeling is magnified.”
If your first take about being fired by a paper that is bleeding money is that you were fired because of your race, perhaps that betrays the style of coverage that you were doing, which might be one of the reasons the paper was suffering.
If you see everything through a racial lens and the paper for which you are reporting keeps losing money, and then you get fired, and in your firing statement, you talk about your specific race, perhaps you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, put out a tweet listing Bezos’ wealth over the years:
<blockquote>Jeff Bezos wealth in 2024: $194 billion Jeff Bezos wealth in 2025: $215 billion Jeff Bezos wealth today: $249.4 billion Net increase in Bezos wealth since 2024: $55.4 billion Cost of Bezos’s 417-foot superyacht: $500 million Amazon investment in &#8220;Melania&#8221;: $75 million Original Bezos purchase price of the Washington Post in 2013: $250 million Bezos net worth in 2013: $25.2 billion Net increase in Bezos wealth since buying the Post: $224.2 billion Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million Number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week: 5</blockquote>
The premise of this tweet is that The Post is a charity, and that Bezos bought it as a charity operation.
The only number that matters in the tweet is this: “Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million.”
Perhaps one of the reasons Jeff Bezos is worth $250 billion is that he does not hold on to declining assets. He does not run his businesses like charities. Maybe that would be the reason.
Maybe that&#8217;s why he is extraordinarily wealthy, and most of the reporters working for him are not, because they think they&#8217;re in the charity business.
As someone who&#8217;s the co-founder of a major media organization in the same business as the Washington Post, let me just say this: When you lose money, and you can see where you&#8217;re losing money, you have to lay people off.
That is how business works.
And Jeff Bezos is not doing anything wrong by laying people off.
The idea that journalists are somehow owed their position because the person who hires them is rich is extraordinary, especially when many of these same journalists are asking that the federal government step in and make the owners of their own businesses not rich anymore.
They think that the people who hire them are simply supposed to absorb the losses.
Bernie Sanders, a complete leech on the ass of American society for the last eight decades, a useless human being in the extreme, put out a statement saying, “If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie and $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don&#8217;t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.”
What is this, “He doesn&#8217;t need to?”
It is not about what people need to do in America; it is about what they want to do and what they have the freedom to do. That&#8217;s why this country kicks ass.
And that&#8217;s why his version of the country sucks.
If Bernie Sanders wants to get together a bunch of his left-wing friends to put together a 501c3 and rehire all the race reporters in the Washington Post, he is free to do that. He could sell his lake house, and he could hire several of these journalists, and they could work for him, and they could gallivant into the utopian socialist sunset together and enjoy their time.
But he&#8217;s not going to do any of that, the man who spent over $550,000 in 2025 campaign funds on private jets. 
How many Washington Post salaries could that pay?

Guild Members Rally Outside The Washington Post After Layoffs

Left-Wing Journalists Panic As WaPo Fires Over 300 Employees

Capitalism

journalists

layoffs

Amanda Nguyen, one of the women aboard the so-called first female space flight, says she experienced depression due to the “tsunami of harassment” following the highly publicized Blue Origin ride.
Besides Nguyen, pop singer Katy Perry, CBS anchor Gayle King, and Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez were among the six women who flew to the edge of space on the Amazon founder’s Blue Origin spacecraft in April. Their flight was touted as historic and important by many major outlets, but critics mocked the circus surrounding the 11-minute space tourism flight.
Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist, said backlash to the flight affected both her career and mental health. The 34-year-old posted about it on her Instagram on Tuesday, describing it as “another dream turned into a nightmare.”
She said the news coverage and social media reactions were “unprecedented,” and argued that even a “small fraction of negativity becomes staggering.” Nguyen also noted that her accomplishment of becoming the first Vietnamese woman in space was “buried under an avalanche of misogyny.”
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<script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script> 
“It amounted to billions of hostile impressions,” she wrote, “an onslaught no human brain has evolved to endure.”
“I did not leave Texas for a week, unable to get out of bed. A month later, when a senior staff at Blue [Origin] called me, I had to hang up on him because I could not speak through my tears,” Nguyen went on.
“In my moments of deep grief this year, I reached back out to a familiar place, to her – my survivor self – who found the strength to fight. How horrible that I needed to deploy that skill once again,” she said.
The space flight participant said only recently that the “fog of grief has started to lift.” “Vietnam saved me … You all saved me,” she went on. 
Blue Origin is a private space company founded in 2000 by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The all-female space flight was criticized by social media users and celebrities for being over-promoted for what it turned out to be.
Actress Olivia Munn said as much on an episode of “Today with Jenna and Friends,” as The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/blue-origin-all-female-crew-including-katy-perry-launches-into-space">reported</a>.
“What’s the point? Is it historic that you guys are going on a ride? I think it’s a bit gluttonous,” Munn said. “Space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind. What are they gonna do up there that has made it better for us down here?”

Amanda Nguyen

Blue Origin ‘Astronaut’ Says Mockery Left Her ‘Depressed’ And ‘Unable To Get Out Of Bed’

Blue Origin 'Astronaut' Says Mockery Left Her 'Depressed' And 'Unable To Get Out Of Bed'

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Blue Origin, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company, joined a very small club on Thursday when it completed its first reusable rocket booster reentry and landing.
The launch, which was Blue Origin’s first for a paying customer, sent two satellites into space for NASA. Those satellites are headed toward Mars to study the impacts of solar wind on the Red Planet, among other things.
The New Glenn rocket booster then reentered the atmosphere and successfully touched down on a floating landing pad.
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— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1989090084902318469?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Good overview of the landing. We nominally target a few hundred feet away from Jacklyn to avoid a severe impact if engines fail to start or start slowly. We’ll incrementally reduce that conservatism over time. We are all excited and grateful for yesterday. Amazing performance by… <a href="https://t.co/DCEMsuSyPm">pic.twitter.com/DCEMsuSyPm</a>
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1989358416532488406?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Acting NASA Admin Sean Duffy <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-two-spacecraft-to-study-mars-solar-wind/">said</a> of the launch: “Congratulations to Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, UC Berkeley, and all our partners on the successful launch of ESCAPADE. This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface. Every launch of New Glenn provides data that will be essential when we launch MK-1 through Artemis. All this information will be critical to protect future NASA explorers and invaluable as we evaluate how to deliver on President Trump’s vision of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.”
Blue Origin’s successful reentry and landing puts the company on more equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which pioneered reusable rocket technology and had its first successful reentry and landing in 2015.
Since then, SpaceX has landed and recovered many boosters, and has caught three with the “chopsticks,” a pair of giant mechanical arms.
In 2023, Blue Origin won a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop the &#8220;human landing system&#8221; for the space agency&#8217;s Artemis V mission.
&#8220;Blue Origin will design, develop, test, and verify its Blue Moon lander to meet NASA’s human landing system requirements for recurring astronaut expeditions to the lunar surface, including docking with Gateway, a space station where crew transfer in lunar orbit,&#8221; NASA <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-blue-origin-as-second-artemis-lunar-lander-provider/">said</a> in a press release.

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