On Tuesday, in one of the more bemusing acts of protest, former Post managing editor Cameron Barr wrote a column for U.S. News & World Report in which he restated his own professional disassociation from the paper where he’d been on contract since stepping down in 2023. His most memorable assignment, of course, was leading the Post’s own investigation into Lewis during the newsroom’s hysteria over Lewis’s past life as a Murdoch deputy amid the phone-hacking scandal. As a kicker, Barr intimated, albeit half-heartedly, that Bezos should sell the paper. Barr is smart enough to know that a sale is not in the cards, just as Baron must surely know that his public criticisms aren’t going to inspire his former boss to have a come-to-Jesus moment. Indeed, Bezos’s current transformation of the Post is only just beginning. And while it can be hard to fathom that the origin of this bewildering journey dawned with Lewis’s infamous managerial snafus, the defection of dozens of the paper’s most high-profile journalists, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of angry subscribers, Bezos is ostensibly playing for a future that’s bigger than most of the paper’s existing and former staff have probably countenanced. After all, he isn’t Patrick Soon-Shiong, a proper billionaire but one who still feels the sting of his $500 million misadventure with the L.A. Times, or even Laurene Powell Jobs or Marc Benioff—who appear willing to nurture less expensive and expansive legacy magazine brands into a new age with a polite mix of tenderness and expectation. Instead, he’s about seven or eight times wealthier than the three of them combined, and fresh off a midlife crisis that seemingly inured him to public opinion. While Post veterans hem and haw over the paper’s legacy, Bezos surely sees the broader context. Even in that halcyon Baron-Trump era, when the Post was growing subscriptions 50 percent year over year, the business never really came within spitting distance of the Times, which has dominated the market for sophisticated liberal-inflected news and lifestyle content, and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. But despite all its success, even the Times has proved that this total addressable market is smaller than many had imagined—and, perhaps, not hospitable to multiple participants. At least 50 percent of the country will likely never tolerate the Times, no less pay for a subscription. And while that might be tolerable for the Sulzbergers, who still feel the twinge of nearly losing the asset more than a decade ago, it’s probably not palatable to the world’s third-wealthiest man. The Post, for its part, has been evidencing these market signals for years—declining traffic, churning subs, losing around $100 million per year—and pointing fingers at the potential culprits while it slides down the greasy pole. Was it C.E.O. Fred Ryan’s fault? What about executive editor Sally Buzbee? After their departures, Lewis found himself in the center of a circular firing squad. But what if the real economic problem, at least for Bezos, was the market where the Post had positioned itself?