Washington Post To Be Sold To Cuban Billionaire Jeff Bezos

At the Washington Post Company's headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. on Monday, Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham and his niece, Post publisher Katherine Weymouth, announced to a room of employees that they would be selling the Post Company and, along with it, its host of newspapers. The buyer is a friend of theirs: Jeffrey Bezos, the New-Mexico born, Miami-raised founder of Amazon.com. Bezos, who says he is an avid reader of the Post as well as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, sent a memo to Post staff on Monday indicating that he didn't intend to change much about the newspaper's operations.

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"The values of The Post do not need changing," Bezos wrote. "The paper's duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we'll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely.

"I won't be leading The Washington Post day-to-day. I am happily living in 'the other Washington'" - Bezos runs Amazon out of Seattle, Washington - "where I have a day job that I love. Besides that, The Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I'm extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on."

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Bezos, 49, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a teenager mother whose marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. Not long after she remarried three years later, Jeff's stepfather Miguel Bezos legally adopted Jeff and moved the family to Houston, then Pensacola, Florida, and finally to Miami-Dade. Miguel Bezos was born in Cuba and came to the United States alone when he was fifteen as part of Operation Peter Pan - a CIA-run program which spread rumors that Fidel Castro's government would be forcibly putting children in military schools and work camps, and helped Cuban parents place their children with host families and group homes in the United States.

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In a 2011 interview with Wired, Jeff Bezos said he'd "never met" his biological father. "But the reality, as far as I'm concerned, is that my Dad is my natural father. The only time I ever think about it, genuinely, is when a doctor asks me to fill out a form."