MG Siegler did a great article on Jeff Bezos, but it still didn’t convince me that buying The Washington Post was a good deal.
“Bezos is a genius”
MG Siegler did a great article on Jeff Bezos, but it still didn’t convince me that buying The Washington Post was a good deal.
I think only time will tell if it is a good deal. He is a man who understands the internet, and newspapers just don’t. It’s definitely a fascinating turn of events at the very least.
Agreed, Jim. I think he’s spot on about Apple & Wall Street, but if Amazon has to turn up prices to make a real profit (like 10% of revenues), then I don’t think everyone will be shopping at Amazon anymore. The ‘game’ doesn’t have a winning move.
I think the only real point of contention isn’t if Bezos can do good things with the Washington Post, but that given the marketplace for newspaper businesses, did he wildly overpay.
When John Henry (owner of the Red Sox) bought the Boston Globe, it was compared to being less than what the Sox would pay for the services of a quality outfielder.
It could be said that the Washington Post went for A-Rod money.
True, the Post is a paper with a greater national importance than the Globe. Even so, the fact that it is a Bezos acquisition, not an Amazon one, and that Bezos has been friends with the prior owners, it suggests there was a deliberate lack of hard negotiation in determining the sale price.
One wonders if the purchase price allows Bezos to invest money into the Post beyond the purchase itself, if need be. Will it be like A-Rod with the Texas Rangers, where A-Rod’s cost kept the Rangers from spending on other positions? Or will it be like A-Rod with the Yankees, just another big check written from deep pockets?
Bezos bought the Post with a teeny bit of the money he has made stringing Wall St along for the last 20 years. This is not checkers vs. chess, or poker. This is a shell game he is playing.
I bet $$$$ that MG has a startup that he wants to sell to Amazon.
Not so hard to understand this model as it is very old.
There is a famous midwestern big box seller who financed growth in a similar fashion 30m years ago. By floating the difference between invoice terms and the financial markets, an additional 23-3% profit was generated per sale. It paid for their rapid expansion.
Bezon doesn’t run his money. Investors do. As for Amazon, the company’s money wasn’t used to buy the Post. It was Bezos’, Siegler doesn’t have a startup to sell anymore because he works for Google Ventures.
What you infer is what you are right about. AMZN loses money and MG Siegler was a poor man’s John Gruber.
MG has always been granted a pass no matter how average his stories were at Venture Beat and brought in the trolls he hated at TechCrunch, for which he was healthily remunerated.
Really well written article. Color me enlightened.
bezos bought the post with the fortune he made off his amazon stock(I assume..?). I am sure Google Ventures has some portfolio companies they would love to sell to Amazon.
I doubt any of these are a fit for Amazon: http://www.googleventures.com/companies. #sarcasm
🙂