Bloomberg has no interest in acquiring Dow Jones or Washington Post, spokesman says

(Reuters) -Bloomberg L.P. has no interest in acquiring either Dow Jones or the Washington Post, a Bloomberg L.P. spokesman said in a tweet.

“There have been no conversations with anyone or either organization about an acquisition,” spokesman Ty Trippet said in the tweet, which was retweeted by billionaire owner Michael Bloomberg.

News website Axios reported on Friday that Bloomberg was interested in acquiring either Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, or the Washington Post from Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, citing a source familiar with Bloomberg’s thinking.

On Friday, citing sources, Reuters reported Michael Bloomberg had expressed a desire to own a big-name newspaper over the years but had not reached out to Murdoch to discuss a possible purchase of Dow Jones and its flagship paper the Journal.

A spokesperson for the Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013 for $250 million, said on Friday it was not for sale.

Antitrust experts agreed the merger of Bloomberg and Dow Jones business news divisions would draw the scrutiny of U.S. regulators, especially as the Biden administration has taken a more muscular approach to enforcing antitrust laws.

Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters Corp, competes with Dow Jones and Bloomberg News, a unit of Bloomberg L.P., a provider of financial news.

(Reporting by Lavanya Ahire in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Ira Iosebashvili; Editing by Diane Craft)