For years, outside investments by senior executives that didn’t pose an obvious conflict — buying real estate, for instance, or a restaurant or a sports team — didn’t rise to the level that required a board to be alerted. Investments in newspapers and other media companies were typically seen as adding a halo to executives’ other work — and possibly even giving them, and by extension their company, leverage in local or national politics.

But that was a different time, one that ended with Mr. Trump’s election.

“I think it fair to ask whether the problem here is correctly framed as Bezos’ and Benioff’s ownership of media properties, or whether the problem is President Trump’s reaction to media criticism, regardless of ownership,” said Joseph A. Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School and a director at the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

The Benioffs have taken pains to emphasize that the purchase was theirs alone, and that they will be caretakers of the brand, not editorial decision makers.

“The Benioffs are purchasing Time personally, and the transaction is unrelated to Salesforce.com,” a statement announcing the sale said. “Mr. and Mrs. Benioff will not be involved in the day-to-day operations or journalistic decisions, which will continue to be led by Time’s current executive leadership team.”

That last sentence would normally be intended to reassure Time’s journalists, but in this environment, it may also be a message to those in Washington.

Of course, whether media owners meddle in the journalism or not, they are invariably painted as if they did. For years, conspiracy theories were floated that Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican billionaire who bought a stake in The New York Times after the financial crisis, was somehow pulling the levers of the newsroom. That was not the case, but the belief nonetheless persisted among opponents of the newspaper.

Mr. Bezos and The Post’s leadership have repeatedly said he has no involvement in any coverage decisions, yet on any given day opponents of the paper offer theories online about how an article was skewed to do Amazon’s bidding.