members of the Pancake Group had fanciful notions that Bezos was going to rescue the Post by spending uncontrollably, he quickly dispelled them. In early 2015, they trekked back to Seattle and presented him with a multiyear operating plan that called for the paper to lose more than $100 million over the next four years. Bezos shot it down immediately. “Yeah, I’m not interested in that” is how one participant recalled his understated reaction. After the meeting, Bezos and Fred Ryan sat down and hashed out a plan to run the paper as a disciplined, stand-alone business, not as the hobby of
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