#61.4 | Bezos: "My master plan to save The Washington Post from AI is working beautifully"
"Everyone thought AI would devastate newsrooms," said the billionaire. "Thanks to my efforts, there won't be anything left to devastate."
SEATTLE (The Robertlandian)—People have been scratching their heads wondering what billionaire Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos has been recently doing. From installing British tabloid executive, Will Lewis, to cutting a third of the staff at The Washington Post, the newspaper has hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of subscribers these past few months. When questioned about the wisdom of alienating millions of loyal paying readers, Bezos confidently replied, “It’s all part of my master plan.”
“You see,” he explained, “people who believe in facts and reporting are a dying breed. Look around you! News today is simply whatever’s most convenient that people wish is true. Why do you think so many read The New York Times?”
When Bezos acquired The Post in 2013 for $250 million, many had hoped the billionaire tech tycoon would continue the paper’s storied tradition of deep investigative journalism and evidence-based reporting. They were all wrong.
“Nowadays, people simply believe whatever they want,” said Bezos. “Can’t you fools see that? There’s no longer such a thing as ‘objective truth’ or a ‘single shared reality’. We all live in our own realities and superimpose our own narratives over whatever the news cycle of the week is. What had been holding back The Post was pesky human beings whom I’ve now largely dispensed with. You think I can’t run a newspaper? I freaking built Amazon! Just you watch— we’re just getting started.”
Robert Lin is a random person in Cincinnati, Ohio. On February 1, 2026 he started writing The Robertlandian, a satirical news series on Substack that publishes every Monday/Wednesday/Friday. He thinks WALL-E is a pretty remarkably prescient movie.