Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was reportedly angry with now-former CEO Will Lewis partying it up in San Francisco during Super Bowl Week, right as he was laying off hundreds of employees at the paper.
The Financial Times on Saturday night reported that was the “last straw” for Lewis, according to one newsroom source.“Bezos lost patience after the Super Bowl thing,” the source told FT.
That report came out right after Lewis stepped down as the chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post on Saturday evening.“Senior management at The Post were livid when they discovered that Lewis was attending festivities around the Super Bowl in San Francisco around the time of the news of the jobs cuts,” the source told FT. “It came off as ‘callous.’”
Yeah, whatever. Maybe Bezos could pull some money out of his couch cushions to pay for this, if he wants to stop looking callous:
After The Washington Post was hit with layoffs cutting a third of its staff, its international reporters are faced with finding away home, some currently in war zones.
Following Wednesday’s restructuring at the Jeff Bezos-owned company, Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief Michelle Ye Hee Lee launched a GoFundMe campaign in attempt to help the “dozens of international employees who were essential to our coverage of global events” in getting home safely.
“These workers are not eligible for protection under the Washington Post Guild and are, in many instances, being laid off with less favorable terms while also facing immense logistical challenges and, in certain cases, serious security risks,” the crowdfunding page reads. “Please help us support this deeply courageous team of people.”
[…]
Lizzie Johnson, a correspondent covering Ukraine, was one such person impacted by this week’s layoffs. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I’m devastated,” she wrote on X from Kyiv.
Former employees of the second most wealthy man on the planet have to rely on a GoFundMe to get them home after being abandoned in far far flung foreign locales. Talk about callous.