He Spent $500M on the LA Times, Then Stopped Paying His Reporter

He's worth billions. He spent $500 million buying the 144-year-old Los Angeles Times, killed its Kamala Harris endorsement, floated an AI "bias meter" to grade his own reporters, and reinvented himself as a friend of the MAGA movement.

There's just one problem: according to reporting first broken by Status and picked up by the Daily Beast, he couldn't reliably pay them. Marquee investigative hire Catherine Herridge went months without a paycheck. A former CBS News president got flown economy and lent an SUV — and walked. The top finance executive stepped down. And now he's trying to raise another $500 million to take the whole thing public. Here's what happens when a billionaire buys a press to control the narrative, and the narrative gets away from him.