In a week of big media deals, the sale of The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com takes the cake.
And helping put together the $250 million newspaper sale: none other than Allen & Company.
According to The Post’s own report on the deal, The Washington Post Company‘s chief executive, Donald E. Graham, hired the boutique investment bank some unspecified time ago. The Post Company’s board spoke with a “half-dozen†possible buyers before settling on Mr. Bezos, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes earlier this year at about $25.2 billion.
Mr. Graham and Mr. Bezos were both at Allen & Company’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, last month. The high-powered gathering of media and technology moguls may have lent cover for the two to cement the deal announced on Monday, the biggest in the newspaper industry since Cablevision bought Newsday for $632 million five years ago, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ.
Mr. Bezos and Mr. Graham have longstanding connections that may have helped the discussions. As The Post’s article notes, Mr. Graham gave the Amazon chief advice on how to promote newspapers on the Kindle device. And Amazon is an investor in LivingSocial, an e-commerce venture led by Tim O’Shaughnessy, Mr. Graham’s son-in-law.
