A former Washington Post columnist is asking why billionaire Jeff Bezos isn't donating any of his fortune to support the money-hungry newspaper following an aggressive round of layoffs this week.

Ruth Marcus, a longtime Post opinion writer, posed the pointed question in an op-ed for the New Yorker on Wednesday.

Marcus, 67, left the Post in 2024 in direct response to editorial changes administered by Amazon founder Bezos that year.  

In her new piece, titled 'How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post', Marcus sought to explain the economic landscape and decision that led to the layoffs, while casting blame on Bezos for not righting the proverbial, sinking ship.

She goes on to question why the billionaire would not just pledge 'one percent' of his estimated $250billion net worth each year in order 'to sustain the paper indefinitely.'

Bezos bought the paper for $250million in 2013 and at the time said 'he wanted it to be profitable.'

Marcus - the author of 'Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover' - went on to concede the prospect was 'a pipe dream' but said 'this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.' 

In another portion of the piece, Marcus wrote that the Post's financial troubles did not truly start until 2023.

Marcus said that much of the preceding decade was bolstered by 'Bezos-fueled growth', before declining ad revenue and readership began to take away from what was also described as 'some profitable years under Bezos'. 

As a means to show how the mogul would be hardly affected by the nine-figure annual losses, Marcus evoked a classic scene from 1941's Citizen Kane.

In the picture, Orson Welles's character receives some stern words from a father figure for keeping his newspaper, The Inquirer, open in the face of yearly losses of a million.  

The young businessman - in what is meant to be a show of decency - says at that rate, 'he'll have to close this place in sixty years'.

Marcus wrote: 'By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights.' 

 The Daily Mail has approached Marcus for comment.

The accomplished columnist worked at the Post for more than 40 years before her resignation, which she wrote was in response to the Bezos-designed Opinion Sector revamp meant to focus on 'personal liberties and free markets.' 

Marcus and many other Post opinion writers resigned in response. In addition to her 41 years as a columnist, Marcus spent nearly a decade as the paper's deputy editorial page director.

Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez, meanwhile, flaunted expensive couture outfits at Paris Fashion Week last week - as rumors of the then-looming layoffs first began to ring out.

The firings came to fruition Wednesday and reduced the Post's by roughly 30 percent.