Will Lewis’ thirst for power
A new longread for the Daily Beast on the Washington Post's imperilled CEO.
Good morning. Here’s a new longread about the British media executive who has spurred the American media into action… against him.
It’s a story about a real-life Tom Wambsgans, serving corporate time in the hope of higher office, praying past deeds stay past.
It’s for The Daily Beast, for whom I’ve started writing. Dive in!
It begins:
Some are born into worlds where men wear $1,100 calfskin-and-suede Zegna sneakers. Others have to scrap, hustle and charm their way into them. There was nothing given about the ascent of Will Lewis—who wears his Zegnas in navy blue with the white leather strap—to the top of the Washington Post.
Lewis, 55, is not a product of the playing fields of Eton, or any of England’s grand institutions. He was sent to Whitefield, a post-war public school built on the site of a disused waterworks. It was next to a vast shopping mall and the pulsating ten-lane highway that cuts through London’s northern suburbs.
Other British men running American newsrooms—CNN’s Mark Thompson, Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait—were privately educated in august surroundings before going “up” to Oxford. Lewis’s parents could have sent him to a private school (his father ran a packaging business) but they were opposed to them, and Lewis’s much older brother had gone from Whitefield to Oxford. Lewis didn’t get in. He went to Bristol, a mid-tier university. No path was laid out for him. He had to find one.
The path he found has taken him from London’s suburbs to the height of American media. He has gotten close to power time and again, convincing three billionaire benefactors to empower him. Rupert Murdoch, his patron throughout the 2010s, was the most significant. Jeff Bezos, who is rumored to have handed Lewis a seven-year contract, is the most recent.
This newsletter has been in abeyance while I wrote one for the New Statesman over the past 15 months or so. In future I will send this out occasionally when I think have something worth sending you. Thanks for reading. — Harry