Having once worked for the great Washington Post newspaper (on the digital side), I was more than a little dismayed to hear the recent announcement that Jeff Bezos was cutting the once mighty paper’s staff by 30 percent.

Here is a guy worth what? Say, $279 billion, give or take a few billion at any moment? And he’s cutting out the sports department, and the metro department, and all the international coverage that made the Post what it once was in its heyday: a top-two or top-three must-read news source.

But he was losing money.

According to some estimates, it was about $100 million per year (and much of that due to recent subscriber losses over his own kowtowing to Trump and not letting the Paper endorse Kamala Harris). Over 20 years, that would be $2 billion if the losses stayed consistent. Or roughly .7 percent of his wealth currently. And with his portfolio of companies that he owns and his Amazon stock, it’s basically negligible.

Too harsh, you say?

I hear it all the time in debating people who have strong opinions on this subject. He has to run this like a business, they all say.

Let’s get one thing out of the way quickly: That’s absolute bullshit.

This is not a traditional business. It’s what’s known as “vanity ownership.” Equivalent to how the Rich have always pursued their hobbies. Sports team ownership. Owning horses. Owning publications.  

The real money isn’t made at the Washington Post – or what brought someone like Bezos here in the first place. It’s supposed to be a loss, one that any rich person knows they can take to offset income for tax purposes, or to indulge as a hobby.   

The idea of “running this as a business,” at that level, is a rather recently made-up conceit by those who: a. Feel like they have to “compete” and show monetary success at everything, and b. Also want to make the point that their rights to just pursue their own self-interest, outside of how it might impact society, trumps everything, including the surrounding community.  

It’s a mindset by the same people who bring you the Cleveland Guardians every year. It’s not about trying to bring a winner to the city (broader good), it’s: Can we demonstrate profitability? That is the real measure of the owner’s business acumen, after all.  

And, you know what? The team is profitable. But the city hasn’t won a World Series since 1948. 

In the Old Days, the Rich Felt ‘Some’ Responsibility for Broader Society

 In the Gilded Age, the richest men in America behaved badly and knew it. But one thing they did do: they tried to balance the ledger by underwriting the public realm. Examples:

• • J.P. Morgan raided Europe’s art markets so New Yorkers could walk through the doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and see “the greatest collections in the world,” not just what they could afford.
  • John D. Rockefeller, through his foundation, funded hospitals and helped to wipe out hookworm in the American South. He also supported the research that produced the yellow fever vaccine.
  • Fortunes built through monopolies and brutal working conditions also built universities, museums, libraries, and hospitals at a time when the government did almost nothing for the poor, immigrants, or the sick.

I’m not romanticizing these men; workers understood the bargain and often rejected it. One labor leader quipped that people didn’t want “Carnegie’s libraries if we must have Carnegie’s mills,” capturing the morality of an era where the same names stood over both sweatshops and symphony halls.

But for all their hypocrisy, the old plutocrats at least accepted that outsized wealth carried some obligation to build shared institutions: Places owned, in theory, by the public, not by a holding company or an app. That’s why their names live not just on yacht registries but on the facades of universities, museums, and hospitals that still shape everyday life.

Today’s moguls often tell a different story about responsibility. Jeff Bezos is still refining plans to give away “most” of his fortune, treating philanthropy as another engineering challenge, while his ex‑wife, MacKenzie Scott, moved more than $7.2 billion into hundreds of charities in 2025 alone, through big, mostly unrestricted grants. If you’re counting, that’s more Elon Musk, Google’s Larry Page, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and her ex-husband Bezos have in their lifetimes combined.

In the last 7 years, she’s given away $26 billion. 

In other words, for his wife, helping others less fortunate is her priority right now. She cares about social responsibility. For him, well, he’ll “figure it out.”

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, openly questions the value of traditional charity, arguing that “it is very difficult to give away money effectively,” and insisting that if you care about “the reality of doing good and not the perception of doing good,” philanthropy becomes “very hard.” His preferred solution is to frame his companies as de facto philanthropic projects: electric cars, rockets, and the global internet, rather than to endow libraries or public universities in the old style.

Yes, there are foundations (Zuckerberg has one, Gates has one, and the list goes on and on) But much of this is about maintaining absolute control over what money gets directed to where, how it’s spent, what it’s spent on, etc. 

The result is a strange perversion of giving and societal responsibility. The Rockefellers and Morgans, with some sense of shame, tried to earn forgiveness by building institutions the public could use, even as they clung to power. Today’s tech barons are more likely to argue that the very systems making them rich are much more their gift to humanity, and that anything resembling old‑fashioned charity must be done surgically, quietly, and preferably under their control.

Why Societal Responsibility Matters More Than Ever Today

I was reading the recent Atlantic piece on AI, America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs. To say it was sobering would be an understatement. The article details a headlong rush into AI, without tech CEOs or other large company chiefs caring about any effects on workers, the environment, or how it might change humanity as a whole. A few summary points:

• • Tasks requiring skill and judgment are now being increasingly done “relentlessly and indifferently, by software that learns as it goes,” and quotes AI leaders predicting 10–20% unemployment and the wipeout of half of entry‑level white‑collar jobs within a few years.
  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is quoted as describing a tech‑CEO group chat betting on when a billion‑dollar company will be run by a single person, an encapsulation of AI as an extreme labor‑arbitrage tool.
  • CEOs “enthusiastically embracing AI” are warning workers that the ice beneath them is cracking, but they keep stomping on it anyway, capturing the gap between their public concern and their actual behavior.

The ice cracking metaphor hits home. And we’ve certainly written about the dangers of AI ourselves, from its assisting in the assault on the middle class to its role in cost-cutting, to the fact that no one really asked for this technology in the first place.

The CEOs keep stomping away because there’s money to be made (by them, primarily) in the immediate term and because the boards and Wall Street (who also want operational efficiencies to compete effectively) continue to push them for it. So, despite their own fears about what might happen to their workers and society, they feel they have no choice but to push on.

But that’s a false choice to start with.

The fact is that CEOs are paid to think long-term for their companies. If their workers don’t have jobs, they don’t have income. If they don’t have income, communities suffer, and no one buys. If no one buys, companies and communities falter.

This isn’t that hard. It just requires some leadership courage and (not all that much) foresight.

Didn’t Adam Smith Say the Pursuit of Self-Interest Was Perfectly Fine?

You’ll find no shortage of people in this country who suggest that our nation was founded on self-interest and its pursuit is (and should be) perfectly normal.  

All true. But to a point.

For example, Adam Smith, the famed 18th-century philosopher who (almost by accident) became the founding theorist behind economics, absolutely thought self‑interest was powerful and useful. But he never treated unrestrained, “blatant” self‑interest as a sufficient or founding ideal for a good society.

Libertarian readings that reduce him to a Gordon Gekko-like “greed is good” approach, much of it due to lines like this from The Wealth of Nations (written in 1776): “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest… we address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self‑love.” 

Smith, however, is equally clear that this everyday self‑interest has to be bounded by justice, by moral norms, and by a state that prevents harm, if it is to yield broad prosperity. Let’s read that again: bounded by justice, moral norms, and a state that prevents harm.

Right now, you might argue that none of those boundaries currently exist. Making this a particularly perilous period in our history if our titans of industry simply choose to exercise their own self-interest all the time.

What Happened to Corporate Social Responsibility?

For those who remember, there was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when corporate social responsibility (CSR) was a thing. Archie B. Carroll’s “Pyramid of CSR” (economic, legal, ethical, philanthropic responsibilities) and Donna Wood’s “Corporate Social Performance” gave boards and executives a language and metrics for talking about responsibility beyond profit.

Indeed, by the early 2000s, large companies like Coca‑Cola, Disney, Pfizer, Wells Fargo, and others had CSR departments, published sustainability reports, and put CSR or “public affairs” committees at the board level.

All of it was moving in the right direction, seemingly.  

So what happened?

CSR got blamed for being too esoteric in a sense. It was so much about reputation and not enough about impact. In the mid-2000s, it morphed into ESG (environmental, social, governance) with a focus on the sustainability piece for companies and the planet.

But like everything that happens in the U.S. these days, that hit a political wall too, with a backlash particularly from conservative politicians and libertarian absolutists who suggested, again, that ESG and its cousin CSR were all distractions (especially, the environment) from a corporation’s fiduciary duty of simply making money.

It’s much easier after all to focus just on making money. And, with that, ESG/CSR was gone, and the bad actors and real villains started moving in.  

Conclusion: Being Good at CSR Means Being a Decent Human Being

At Marketing Nice Guys, one of the things we’re really grateful for is that, for the most part, the clients we work with all care about their employees, their communities, and their partners. And it shows up in how they interact, how they think about things, and how they approach their businesses.

Make no mistake, all of them want to make money. But they do so in a way that benefits not just the owners, but everyone they touch. They don’t need a fancy CSR program; they just inhabit CSR organically because it’s the right thing to do.

Such actions aren’t rocket science. It’s just basic human decency. Maybe that’s what we really need to get back to.