Opinion | The hard truth: Americans don't trust — or need — billionaires

A note from our owner.

Chris Geidner is the owner, publisher, editor, and author of Law Dork.

I am not a billionaire.

Jeff Bezos, a billionaire, is causing a stir over at The Washington Post, which he bought two years before Donald Trump began his first and only (thus far) winning campaign for president.

Bezos ended the newspaper’s presidential endorsement, which was readying to back Kamala Harris, with an announcement 11 days before the election. A seemingly dam-breaking move, the episode has unleashed significant anger at Bezos and the paper after many months of questionable decisions.

What’s worse, he wasn’t alone. The Los Angeles Times, owned by another billionaire — Patrick Soon-Shiong — also backed out of endorsing in the presidential race this year.

Robert Reich, an expert at criticizing billionaires, had some things to say:

Cowardice and intimidation at The Washington Post and L.A. Times

On Monday, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported that the newspaper had lost more than 200,000 subscribers following the move. This is huge:

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of roughly 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

That, in turn, appears to have led Bezos to thinking that Monday night was the time for him to lecture his employees and readers — and, honestly, the world — about journalism.

No room on the editorial page for a presidential endorsement in a pivotal election year, but the billionaire quickly got his thoughts up there — and, the paper reported, will be in the print edition on Tuesday.

Interesting how that works.

It was a trite, objectivity-journalism-above-all-else piece in part:

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. …

What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

That’s just a silly claim, but I’ll leave it for others because I don’t want to get dragged down into that debate on his terms.

Instead, I want to highlight that his opinion column also turned into a believe-me-I’m-doing-this-for-the-right-reasons piece:

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

If this isn’t evidence of the extreme insulation of the powerful here — if not an effort to intentionally mislead readers — then I don’t know what it is.

Bezos’s choice to bring Williams Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch staffer connected to scandals there, to be CEO of the Post earlier this year has been criticized extensively since Day One — with significant parts of that criticism being based on a belief that the move was aimed at reining in the Post to make it more palatable to conservatives.

But, here we are.

The paper that convinced us all that it was doing the right thing because “Democracy dies in Darkness” has all-but-literally turned off the lights on its presidential endorsement. Three of 10 members of the editorial board have resigned from the board as a result.

As people online debate what the right move is — whether cancelling subscriptions is right or wrong, and which subscriptions are we even talking about, the Post or Amazon Prime or both — I’ve written that I don’t have the answers. That’s not a hedge. Go read my thread at Bluesky for my thoughts.

Ultimately, though, it all seems somewhat circular to me when these men have the amounts of money they have. And, as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Patrick Soon-Shiong have shown time and time again, their bottom line is their bottom line.

They are not here for us.

What I do know — and if Bezos can lecture us about journalism, I’ll take a few seconds to lecture about wealth accumulation — is that they should not be able to amass the money and power that they have been able to amass.

Tulane Law School professor Ann Lipton put it well in her Virginia Law & Business Review article about Musk’s Twitter purchase, “Every Billionaire Is a Policy Failure” —a phrase popularized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“[U]nelected individuals do not have the legitimacy to single-handedly alter public policy, no matter how vast the private fortune they have amassed,” she wrote.

Describing Musk earlier in the article, she highlighted the lack of accountability present in his life — and how it has helped him acquire more and more:

It’s not uplifting — but, especially if we come out of this election intact — we must face this because, in our system today, these billionaires are doing all they can, and often, to “single-handedly alter public policy.” Often with help from the U.S. Supreme Court.

With Musk out there behaving badly on the campaign trail for Donald Trump and Bezos and Soon-Shiong pulling their editorial boards’ sought endorsements for Kamala Harris at two of the five largest newspapers in the country, we’re watching the effects of this policy failure daily.

Sorry to these men, but, when it comes down to it, Americans don’t trust — or need — billionaires.