How Jeff Bezos wound up buying the Washington Post

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post was made on a handshake.

In a wide-ranging interview at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Bezos acknowledged he agreed to pay $250 million to buy the Washington Post from the Graham family in 2013 without looking at the books.

“I did zero due diligence,” he told the Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson during the interview. Bezos was tapped as the No. 1 mogul at this year’s event.

“I did not negotiate. I accepted the asking price. [Then-Washington Post CEO] Donald Graham was the most honorable person in the world. He laid out every single [detail] worth knowing that was bad and everything that was great about the paper.

“No amount of due diligence would have uncovered the things he told me,” Bezos asserted.

The billionaire said he is changing the business model and the culture at the paper from one where a small number of people pay a high price to one where a wide number of people pay a low price.

At the same time, he remains skeptical that consumers are ready to make micro-payments for articles.

Despite his business input, Bezos said he very rarely ventures into the newsroom. “I call it the other Washington,” the Seattle resident said of DC.

While the Bezos talk focused on Amazon’s expansion and “the need to be nimble and robust and able to take a punch,” it was politics that garnered the most attention in the 40-minute interview.

One questioner asked him what he thought of the disclosure this week that eBay co-founder Peter Thiel donated more than $1 million to the Donald Trump campaign.

“Peter Thiel is a contrarian,” said Bezos. “You have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.”

On the rare occasions they are right, he conceded, they usually “win big.”

Thiel was an early backer of Facebook and still sits on its board. Bezos said that, while he might disapprove of the donation, he would not force such a person off a board of directors.

“It’s way too divisive to say, ‘If you have this opinion, you can’t sit on my board.’ That makes no sense.”