The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO) is an American mass media company, best known for owning the newspaper for which it is named, The Washington Post. The company also owns Kaplan, Inc., a leading international provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools, and businesses. In addition, the company owns The Slate Group, Express, El Tiempo Latino, The Gazette and Southern Maryland newspapers, The Herald (Everett, WA), Post-Newsweek Stations (Detroit, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio and Jacksonville), Cable ONE—a cable TV and Internet service provider with subscribers in midwestern, western, and southern states—and Avenue100 Media Solutions, an online lead generation provider. The company previously owned Newsweek and Newsweek.com, but sold the magazine in 2010 after years of financial losses.

The Washington Post Company history dates back to 1877, when the Post was first published. The Washington Post Company was incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1889, and remained a District of Columbia corporation until it changed its state of incorporation to Delaware in 2003. It is a public company, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol WPO; it went public in 1971. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

The Washington Post is the most widely circulated newspaper published in Washington, D.C., and oldest extant in the area, founded in 1877. Located in the capital city of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. Daily editions are printed for the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. The newspaper is published as a broadsheet, with photographs printed both in color and in black and white. In 2008, Marcus Brauchli replaced long-time executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., serving publisher Katharine Weymouth.

In the early 1970s, in the best known episode in the recent history of The Post, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal; reporting in the newspaper greatly contributed to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. In years since, its investigations have led to increased review of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The newspaper is also known as the namesake of "The Washington Post March", which John Phillip Sousa composed in 1889 while he was leading the United States Marine Band; it became the standard music to accompany the two-step, a late 19th-century dance craze.

Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos (/beɪzəs/, born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen. His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him. At an early age, Bezos displayed a striking mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.

Bezos was born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. When Jeff was five, she remarried, this time to Miguel Bezos. Miguel was born in Cuba, immigrated to the United States alone when he was fifteen years old, worked his way through the University of Albuquerque, married, and legally adopted Jeff. After the marriage, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel became an engineer for Exxon. The young Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in southern Texas, "laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills."

Sidney Harman (August 4, 1918 – April 12, 2011) was an American businessman active in education, government, industry, and publishing. He was the Chairman Emeritus of Harman International Industries, Inc. Harman served as the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce in 1977 and 1978. As of August 2010 Harman was also the publisher of Newsweek.

Harman was married to Jane Harman (born 1945), a former Democratic member of Congress from California who represented California's 36th congressional district which included the Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach areas of Southern California.

Harman's father worked at a hearing aid company in New York while he was growing up. After graduating with a physics degree Sidney's first job was at a loudspeaker company as an engineer. His boss was Bernard Kardon and roughly thirteen years later each invested $5000 to make the Festival D1000 - the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver. Harman and Kardon founded harman/kardon, Inc., in 1953. He was known for the quality of working life programs that he initiated at the company’s plants, especially for the program at Bolivar, Tennessee, which had some short-lived success and has become a model for such activities in American industry and a principal case study at business schools in the United States and abroad. Harman had written on productivity, quality of working life and economic policy, and was co-author, with Daniel Yankelovich, of Starting With the People, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1988.