Bezos and Washington Post show honeymoon is over for tech mogul media owners

Amid intense speculation to the contrary, the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos last week sought to reassure a nervous newsroom at the Washington Post that he was not seeking to sell the august newspaper.

Anxiety peaked 10 days ago when Bezos visited the Post and reaffirmed his commitment to journalism, but just four days before the paper announced a wave of layoffs across the title.

On the surface, nothing had changed but the story did serve to illustrate how well the recent marriage of rich tech moguls and US media has worked out after a wave of wealthy men (and women) purchased troubled news outlets, in some cases, after decades of dynastic family ownership.

With the valuations of tech companies now falling across the sector, what would be the knock-on to media outlets that the tech billionaires bought as totems of prestige, influence and public service, and who may have imagined that they could refashion for a modern media by consumer-focused data technology?

Vice Media, which received investment from Disney and 21st Century Fox, and was once valued at $5.7bn, is on the block for less than $1bn. In December, loss-making Buzzfeed recently announced it was cutting 12% of its estimated 1,522 employees.

Separately, the news startup Semafor said last week it was looking to return $10m in funding it received from the indicted crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, following the lead of Vox Media and ProPublica.

But the impression that media companies could be run as consumer-focused tech companies like Amazon or Google may have been misinformed, said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.