Mentions Jeff Bezos

Shameless.

Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday morning about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

Four years ago, the U.S. entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the U.S. had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.

Four years later, March 18, 2024, the US has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to IPS calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data. (Thank you, Forbes!)

A Jeff Bezos-backed real estate investing startup is launching a new fund to make it even easier for everyday Americans to speculate on the rental homes of other everyday Americans.

Arrived, which first launched in 2021, snatches up single-family homes and turns them into rental properties that anyone can invest in for as little as $100. Until now, Arrived customers could only purchase shares of individual homes and receive dividends from the rental profits, effectively creating a distributed network of landlords.

Now, the company plans to allow customers to easily invest in a broad portfolio of its rental housing, further financializing the housing market for a growing consortium of fractional mini-landlords. The company’s newly launched “Single Family Residential Fund” lets investors put their money in a fund that invests in single-family homes across the company’s holdings, similar to a Real Estate Investment Trust. The fund also has a minimum $100 investment. 

In a webinar touting the new fund last week, the company explained it is betting on single-family home rentals because fewer people can afford to buy homes and more people are stuck renting.