Jeff bezos

Saturday

David Whitehouse

Will the New Glenn explosion put America behind China in the Moon race?

From our US edition

Last Thursday's explosion of the New Glenn rocket, on its launch pad during a test, could hardly be worse news for America’s return to the Moon. Just two days earlier, NASA had unveiled its plans for a Moon Base, which relied heavily on Jeff Bezos’s rocket and his Blue Origin series of lunar landers. As investigators, safety and clean-up crews inspect the wreckage, NASA will be contemplating a major rethink. The options aren’t good. Explosions on the pad are among the worst things that can happen because of how long repairs can take. If a rocket is to explode, engineers pray that it takes place in the air.

new glenn

Wednesday

Peter Jones

Rome vs Jeff Bezos’s yacht 

Rumour has it that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is selling his agreeable little yacht Koru because it will not fit into places like Monaco and Venice and costs far too much to run. Poor old Jeff! Had he studied Classics, he would have known this was not a wise project. In 240 BC, we are told, Archimedes designed for Hiero II, tyrant of Syracuse, the cargo boat Syracusia, protected by fearsome armaments, carrying 400 tons of grain and 500 tons each of pickled fish, wool and other cargo. It had interior panelling of cypress, ivory and aromatic cedar. Multi-coloured mosaics re-telling the Iliad covered the three floor-levels. There was a temple to Aphrodite, the ship’s guardian deity, and statues and artworks were liberally scattered about.

Tuesday

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Who says Lauren Sánchez Bezos doesn’t belong at the Met Gala?

Lauren Sánchez Bezos, with her blown-out lip filler, understands fashion. She understands that, unlike the gatekeepers of painting and literature, fashion figureheads aren’t ashamed to dirty their hands by digging around in the money pot. It was only fitting, then, that Lauren and her husband Jeff Bezos sponsored this year's Met Gala. Its theme was "Fashion Is Art." All Kardashian-Jenners present came in bodices protruding in the shape of their nipples Sánchez Bezos showed up to the Met red carpet in a navy-blue gown that nodded to John Singer Sargent's painting of Madame X, a socialite and the wife of a French banker. The painting's portrayal of a pale, corpse-like, high-society woman was considered indecent because of the single strap falling off her shoulder.

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

The Bezos-Musk rivalry and the changing power of media

From our US edition

Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach him this: the whole strategy behind the business that made him rich, Amazon.

Bezos

Monday

David Whitehouse

Will Bezos beat Musk to the Moon?

From our US edition

Even Elon Musk has to face a dose of reality every once in a while. Technology and politics have forced him to turn his gaze away from Mars, for the moment at least, to put Americans back on the surface of the Moon before China gets there. But it might already be too late. If America has any chance of beating China, it now seems inevitable that the next American human landing on the Moon will not be by Musk’s Starship but using a craft being developed by his rival Jeff Bezos. Announcing the pivot, Musk wrote on X: “For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.

Bezos

Thursday

Tina Brown

How Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

Sunday

Cockburn

The end of Will Lewis’s Washington Post experiment

From our US edition

And now his watch is ended. Sir Will Lewis fell on his sword last night, resigning as CEO and publisher of the Washington Post. “After two years of transformation at the Post, now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis said in an email to staff. In his note, Lewis thanked only the Post’s proprietor Jeff Bezos. Cockburn hears that least one journalist replied to Lewis’s email, “Bye, bitch.” Lewis had a troubled and confusing tenure. In his final week, the Post cut 30 percent of its staff, including the full books section and scores of foreign reporters. The publication also folded its vaunted sports section into features.

Owen Matthews

How the Washington Post became a liability for Bezos

From our US edition

What does Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post say about America’s sense of itself and of its place in the world? Bezos has scrapped much of the paper’s foreign coverage, as well as the books and sports sections. Over three hundred reporters and editors have been fired – including publisher Will Lewis. The Ukraine bureau has been closed, along with Berlin and the entire Middle Eastern and Iran team. You’d think there wasn’t much going on in the world. Does that mean that American readers are no longer interested in books or foreign news? That doesn’t sound true. The numbers of literate, educated and interested readers in the US who were devoted followers of the Post’s world-class books section and prizewinning foreign coverage haven’t collapsed.

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

From our US edition

To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter.

bill gates

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Why Venice deserves Jeff Bezos’s wedding

13 min listen

Jeff Bezos is getting married in Venice – but not everyone is celebrating. Venetians have staged small protests, accusing the billionaire of symbolising the city’s takeover by the ultra-rich. But is this anything new? Associate editor Owen Matthews joins Freddy Gray to discuss.

Saturday

Sean Thomas

Venice was built for Jeff Bezos’s wedding to Lauren Sanchez

From our US edition

Most cities, especially those whose survival depends on tourism, might welcome the multi-squillion-dollar wedding of the world’s third-richest man. Imagine the $500 million superyacht gliding in like a Bond villain’s aqua-lair. Think of two hundred almost-as-rich guests, spilling vintage Trentodoc. Consider the spectacular press coverage, the endless sparkle, and, not least, the 14,000 Aperol spritzes sold per hour. This event means a thousand cameras trained on the city’s finest hotels and restaurants: providing the kind of advertising that folding money cannot buy. There is probably only one city on earth that would disfavour such an opportunity, and it is, of course, the world’s most exquisite: Venice.

Jeff Bezos

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Venice deserves Jeff Bezos

Venetians are once again revolting. Not, this time, against cruise ships, wheeled luggage, over-tourism or rule from mainland Mestre. No – according to a small but vocal contingent of the island city’s eternally discontented, it is Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos who embodies all that threatens La Serenissima. Bezos’s offence is that he is planning to marry Lauren Sánchez, a former TV journalist, in a three-day celebration in central Venice beginning on 24 June. His 250 guests will include many of the most famous and wealthy people on the planet. The celebrity-obsessed Italian press, deprived of such a world-class spectacle since George Clooney’s Venetian nuptials with Amal Alamuddin in 2014, is in a frenzy of anticipation.

Friday

Neal Pollack

Will Jeff Bezos steal Elon Musk’s electric crown with a $20,000 truck?

From our US edition

Though it got somewhat lost in our daily swirl of World In Crisis, last week marked a potentially significant moment in American industry: the formal introduction of a new, low-cost US-based car company. This company is called Slate, mercifully no relation at all to the online magazine. The startup, significantly backed by Jeff Bezos, last week pulled the sheet off a $27,000 fully electric pickup truck, which should be available by the end of 2026.The Slate Truck is significant for what it doesn’t have. The body is plastic, the manually adjustable seats cloth and it lacks electric windows. The driver will operate the windows with a manual crank. It has two doors, a 4x5 bed and black painted steel wheels. It comes in basic gray.

Bezos

Tuesday

Cockburn

A White House Correspondents’ Dinner hangover

From our US edition

By now, you have surely got a flavor of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and all the accompanying parties that took place over the weekend. After all, the DC media has nothing to talk about other than itself. The President long ago chose not to attend, and that the intimation was that members of his administration should skip the “MSM” events too. There were fewer celebrities than ever – not least because the White House Correspondents’ Association got rid of the comedian who was set to provide the entertainment. The gargantuan TIME after-party – your correspondent saw the entry tally at over 2,470 when he arrived at 11:30 – smelled like feet due to the Raclette on the rear terrace.

white house

Tuesday

Cockburn

Meet CuomoGPT

From our US edition

Former governor uses AI to co-author housing plan If you were worried about disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo being too “hands-on” during his run for New York mayor, fear not: the Love Gov’s campaign has an impersonal touch to it. Local news site Hell Gate exposed how the 29-page housing plan released by the Cuomo campaign bore the hallmarks of being partially put together using ChatGPT. One particularly unparsable passage: Nevertheless, several candidates for mayor this year have either called directly for a rent increase or for other measures that would tilt the scale toward lower rent increases. This is a politically convenient posture, but to be in. Victory if landlords — small landlords in particular — are simply unable to maintain their buildings.

cuomo

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis

40 min listen

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist and journalist John Lanchester, one of the contributors to Michael Lewis’s very timely new anthology of reportage on the United States federal government, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. Can the public learn to love a bureaucrat? John tells me why he thinks the workings of government are misunderstood and under appreciated, why we should marvel at the making of the consumer price index, and why he thinks Elon Musk has ‘the wrong handle of the shopping bag’.

Monday

John Steele Gordon

Recession? What recession?

From our US edition

The stock market, traditionally a leading indicator, entered correction territory last week. But does that indicate that a recession is coming? Well, it’s an old saying on Wall Street that the market has predicted ten of the last three recessions. Markets hate uncertainty, and no one knows how President Trump’s efforts to use American tariffs to force our trading partners to lower theirs will turn out. But foreign trade is increasingly important to all countries, so it’s likely that, after some political Sturm und Drang, deals will be struck and international trade will continue the strongly upward path it has been on since the end of World War Two. By definition, a recession is two consecutive quarters of contraction.

shares

Friday

Derek VanBuskirk

On the ground at the Sesame Street public media protest

From our US edition

Washington, DC The Sesame Street crew appeared at NPR headquarters to support a “Protect My Public Media” rally to protest President Donald Trump, Congress and the FCC yesterday. Big Bird, Elmo and Count von Count stood behind those who gave their prepared addresses. Around them stood nearly two dozen protesters carrying signs in support of NPR and PBS. One woman to the left of Elmo waved a banner that read, “No one voted for Elon Musk,” which she likely recycled from a previous protest. The rally was run by Protect My Public Media, an action network that aims to “protect the federal investment in public media.” Craig Aaron of the Free Press spoke first.

Friday

Cockburn

Bezos dines with Trump after dicing up Opinion page

From our US edition

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” wrote billionaire Jeff Bezos in a Wednesday note to the staff of his newspaper, the Washington Post. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The missive from on high sent shockwaves around the capital. David Shipley, the Post’s Opinion editor, stepped away from his role over the new directive. Libertarian magazine Reason had a field day: “If this sounds like something you might want to read, may I suggest @reason where we’ve been doing this since 1968?” wrote editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

jeff bezos

Wednesday

The Spectator

Trump holds first Cabinet meeting

From our US edition

The Cabinet Room was packed. President Trump sat in the middle of the full oblong table. On his right was his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was voted in unanimously by the Senate; on his left a newcomer to politics, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, whose appointment only passed the Senate thanks to the deciding vote of Vice President J.D. Vance. Vance was directly opposite the president — and crowded between the VP and the back wall were several journalists equipped with microphones and cameras, leering over Trump’s appointees.In his introductory remarks, Trump said he was reelected to cut taxes, handle the border and balance the budget. He reaffirmed that his mandate to accomplish these tasks came from the US electorate.