Will Lewis, the stubbled bumbler brought in by Jeff Bezos to lay waste to the Washington Post, is gone. Lewis announced over the weekend that he was resigning as the newspaper’s CEO and publisher. But mission accomplished! Not since King George III razed the White House has a Brit so fucked up our nation’s capital.
“[N]ow is the right time for me to step aside,” read Lewis’s note to his workforce, a much smaller sample group than when he came on the job in late 2023.
Lewis flees the Post the same week that executive editor Matt Murray disclosed that 300 or so employees, estimated to be a third of the staff, were canned. The sports and books sections were euthanized, and local and international reporting desks were severely gutted. Previous moves had already left the opinion page without rationality. (This dumbass editorial on Billie Eilish at the Grammys captures the sad state of Post commentary.) There really is no clear path forward for the Post to maintain relevancy even in its home market, let alone recapturing past glories. But what glories they were!
Lewis was reportedly not present for Wednesday’s Zoom call with staff disclosing the cuts. He was, however, spotted far from the crime scene just one day after the worst single day in his newspaper’s century-and-a-half history, partying out west during Super Bowl week. Nicki Jhabvala, a sportswriter who left the Washington Post for The Athletic this past summer, caught the absentee boss looking ruddy and rotten while walking a red carpet at an NFL shindig. The image went viral.
Will Lewis was too busy to join the call to tell his staff he’s destroying the @washingtonpost sports department yesterday … but he did have time to walk the red carpet at NFL Honors here in San Francisco today. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/mnCXa8IQqC
— Nicki Jhabvala (@NickiJhabvala) February 6, 2026
Bezos did nothing in June 2024 when it came out that Lewis, who’d worked for Rupert Murdoch before taking the Post gig, had tried to quash the Post’s reporting on his role in covering up alleged criminal behavior at Murdoch-owned tabloids. But the Financial Times reported that Bezos found Lewis’s post-firings socializing at the Super Bowl “callous.” And now he’s gone.
According to the Washington Post's AI-powered search engine, the paper has yet to report on Lewis’s resignation.
