Once a guiding light for beltway political coverage, from the backrooms of Congress to the hallowed halls of the White House, The Washington Post has been in sharp decline since Jeff Bezos began speed-running the plot to Citizen Kane. Bezos, once the world’s richest man, bought the paper for $250 million in 2013, but since just before President Donald Trump’s return to office in 2024, he started putting his thumb on the scales like never before. He blocked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, a move that cost the paper 250,000 subscribers. Less than six months later, Bezos’ movie studio, Amazon MGM, bought the distribution rights to Melania—a fawning, if ineffective, bit of propaganda made by disgraced filmmaker and Jeffrey Epstein pal Brett Ratner—for $75 million. As that movie was in the middle of bombing at the box office, so far returning $13 million on Amazon’s political donation/investment, Bezos fired a third of The Washington Post‘s staff. How many salaries could Melania‘s budget have paid for? All the ones recently cut by the Post, three times over.
The numbers start to get strange immediately, as Amazon paid eight times the typical price for a political documentary. And it seems like it came from the very top. Puck‘s Matthew Belloni was skeptical that former Amazon Studio head Jen Salke was interested in the film at all, and a few weeks before Amazon made the deal, Bezos had dinner with Trump and his wife at Mar-a-Lago. This led to, per The New York Times, Bezos going all-in on overpaying for Melania. Where Amazon spent $75 million for Melania, the company had previously spent a total of $12 million on the liberal-leaning docs I Am Not Your Negro, Mayor Pete, the Stacy Abrams film All In, and Time, a documentary about incarceration. Not only did Bezos inflate Melania‘s value, but Amazon also poured another $35 million into marketing the film, about 10 times what even a high-profile doc costs to advertise. For comparison, Disney also bid on the film, maxing out at $14 million, which is still high for a documentary.
But not everyone is taking a bath on the film. Melania made a fortune off Melania, earning a reported $28 million paycheck, just shy of the $29 million that Arnold Schwarzenegger received for returning to Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. Not bad for a documentary subject. It all amounts to what many people are calling a bribe. “This has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing,” Ted Hope, Amazon’s former head of production, told the Times. “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”
We’re seeing, essentially, money flowing from one end of a personal fortune to the other, kneecapping journalism to prop up propaganda. The same money spent paying off the First Lady’s vanity project could’ve been used to fund the crucial reporting that made the Post a cornerstone of American journalism—or at least offset some of Bezos’ other poor business decisions for the paper, like its subscriber-hemorrhaging bothsidesism and its investment in opinion writers who would focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”
So just how many Washington Post salaries could the bribe-sized budget for Melania have paid for? In the latest bloodbath, the Post laid off 300 journalists, including some who were reporting from warzones and who spent the last few weeks pleading with the owner to reconsider the cuts. According to Glassdoor data, which we admit is probably not 100% accurate, the median salary at The Washington Post is $86,000. There are people making much more and much less within the organization. Some reporters make less than $60,000, while the ever-important opinion editors can make upwards of $200,000. But simply assuming that each of the 300 employees recently laid off was earning $86,000, paying their salaries for a year would cost the impossibly rich Mr. Bezos $25.8 million. Even if he laid off the entire newspaper staff, the bidding price alone for Melania could’ve sustained them all for another year. And that’s not including the $35 million marketing budget. And of course, this also isn’t considering that with his $224 billion net worth, Bezos could pay 800 Post employees a million-dollar salary for 280 years. But we digress.
Accounting for Melania‘s not-so-boffo B.O. of $7 million for its first weekend and $5 million in its second, the film’s now only $63 million in the hole (again, not counting the marketing budget). That’s enough to keep more than 700 median-paid journalists on the job. Bezos not only chose his relationship with the president over the readers, but chose to juxtapose his bad business sense as publicly as possible. Democracy may die in darkness, but it seems that journalism dies at the box office.
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