Of course, we all know the only reason WashPo publishes articles critical of the administration is Bezos right? It mean, it's not like every other mainstream paper all over the world does it. And for no connection, no connection at all, the Whitehouse is suddenly talking about raising the rate Amazon is charged for postage. That couldn't possibly be vindictive retaliation by state power to get a newspaper to change, could it? Nah.
He actually seems to understand the relationship of publisher to newspaper in a way that fairly traditional. He ( in the form of Amozon ) has made it very easy to subscribe to the Post and helped raise it's paywall. But has assiduously left the editorial side of the house to the people he has hired to run it.
Is there a good way to verify it’s actually written by him? Doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to set up a fake Medium profile and post this claiming to be him. There’s nothing else posted under this profile, almost no followers, unless he has linked to it from some other verified source I don’t think we can assume it is genuine.
Edit: apparently he verified it by tweeting it. Still a worthwhile thing to remember to check in the future though, I imagine this kind of thing eventually being gamed, especially in such a drama-filled escapade as this.
As Bezos states in his post, he already gets tons of crap from Trump and other idiots that he uses WaPo for personal ends (mainly because these other amoral characters couldn't believe themselves owning a newspaper and not using it as a personal propaganda outlet). He's wise to post this on a neutral platform and not give his enemies any more ammunition.
Sure, I don't think leaning on WaPo would have helped him here (and I did not suggest that). Plenty of other papers he doesn't own publish random letters to the editor.
It would be unethical because any media outlet he owns is an inappropriate place to select to air his personal business. Whether or not he pays for it is immaterial.
Personal stuff is for blogs. The Washington Post is a business, a respected newspaper, an internationally renowned journalistic publication. It’s not a soapbox for Bezos...
In fact, why not bring up that he owns one of the most heavily trafficked websites on the planet. Why didn’t he publish this letter to Amazon.com front page? Equally valid question, no?
Apparently it's not a clear cut case of extortion, because no money is exchanged. A "thing of value" may do, but it's not clear that AMI's demands rise to that level.
AMI is willing to accept a loss of future profits gained from running the story, in exchange for Bezos’s capitulation. If you have access to AMI’s advertising rate card and a rough subscriber count you can estimate the USD value this information represents.
As others have mentioned, “thing of value” does not have to be monetary. For example, there are a number of cases where a person was found guilty of extorting another for sexual favors[0] or to exact a particular benefit (political or otherwise) from a victim.
No, it doesn't only mean "money". Still, it's not perfectly clear that the requested declaration is a "thing of value" and legal scholars are already debating it.
The idea of AMI foregoing a story is not a good argument in this case because this would mean AMI profits by Bezos ignoring the request...
He doesn't need to use the Post. He's the richest man in the world, if he writes an article claiming someone is trying to extort him it'll get plenty of press regardless. And with Medium he can just publish it himself and it removes any biases folk have about the paper.
He owns a newspaper company, but the newspaper isn't his personal blog. It would be quite improper to use it as such, and a decent editor probably wouldn't allow it. He could maybe write an opinion piece, though even that seems dubious.
> Well, that got my attention. But not in the way they likely hoped. Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?
Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a prominent person post the details of a personal extortion attempt out of defiance for all to see.
I think another interesting thing about these times, compared to when such things may have happened 20+ years ago, is that the photos they've described would cause rather little outrage or attract much beyond a few giggles from the public. Especially if released after their existence is already known about. I think the iCloud leaks of 2014 severely tempered society's salacious demand for more pictures of this nature.
As I read Bezos's post, I noticed that at the section where he describes the photographs, I found myself simply scrolling past them to get to the next part of the story.
100% — Let’s be realistic. Between two consenting adults is there anything non-violent that is truly that weird? We have a few pleasure bits attached to our bodies. Some people get excited by objects (fetishes). When you step back a level, the window dressing becomes laughably irrelevant. You’ve seen my dick? Oh no. You saw me courting another female? Private, but oh, the horror.... it’s just so silly in the scheme of it all. I would laugh and laugh at anyone that tried to extort me in this way. “Hey team, someone stole some dick picks of mine, don’t look at them if you want eye contact to remain comfortable, lol.” Life goes on. Am I being a little flippant, yeah, but seriously, step back, in 10 years this won’t even be a footnote on his Wikipedia page beyond the fact that he spanked AMI like the bad toddlers they are.
Outrage? I doubt it, frankly. Max Mosley was literally filmed in 2008 having a BDSM orgy with hookers dressed up in Nazi regalia and even then the reaction was more muted than not. To the extent there was a public outcry it stemmed entirely from the Nazi themes more than the sexual acts themselves. Personally I give that a pass as well, but understand why it would ruffle feathers.
"I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."
--The President of the United States
Everything you mention pales in comparison to the quote above as long as it's between enthusiastically consenting adults.
Probably more to do with the fact that there's so much high quality porn on the internet that we're honestly desensitized to amateur quality celeb nudes. Briefly intriguing, but overall rather "meh?"
Granted, I could just be projecting, but I don't think I'm alone here.
Well, it's sort of weird because I think at one time the thought was that "serious people" would never take a nude of themselves or have affairs, that this kind of action was somehow "beyond the pale" and an action only a few outliers engage in. Nowadays, everyone seems to have decided that these activities are actually very common, though likely still in the minority (I think??)
By and large, humans are sympathetic when they can empathise - or in other words when they can see themselves in another's shoes. At this point, I'd wager most adults in the developed world have learned that they too have an impressive capacity to grow skeletons in their own digital closet, and adjust their worldview and morality slider accordingly.
I don't know. To be honest, I'm a tad curious. The prospect of memes comparing him to Johnny Sins and subsequent bezos / Amazon porn parodies seems humorous.
Yeah, AMI really seems to be operating with an outdated world view here, whereas Bezos correctly assessed that the public at large will be more impressed by the act of standing up to a blackmail attempt than they're concerned about his marital fidelity. AMI's going to get dunked hard : being simultaneously amoral and stupid makes them the easiest target in the world.
Are the people downvoting this (presumably Trump supporters), that AMI admitted guilt in attempting to influence the 2016 by using their well known tactics to snub a story damaging to the candidate, and that their plea agreement stipulates that they would no longer commit anymore crimes, and that by blackmailing Bezos, they're essentially broken their plea agreement?
This is the very definition of a criminal enterprise. Breaking federal election laws, blackmailing those investigating your crimes. If the connection to the Trump campaign bothers you, that too is factual, given that AMI's agreement involved assistance they gave to the Trump campaign that was illegal, and the owner, David Pecker, is a close personal friend of the President.
There's pretty good circumstantial evidence from this, and the Cohen tapes, that using power and privilege to "deal with" personal or political enemies does not give pause to these people.
I think it's that people are allergic to partisan flamebait, with good reason. Also, these comments usually break the site guidelines. So do comments alleging astroturfing and related things (bottage, shillage) without evidence, so could you guys please not post those?
Except that it is factual that AMI is involved in a criminal enterprise, since they plead guilty to crimes involving improper attempts to influence the 2016 election.
Ok, but I don't think it changes the point. Facts aren't neutral, because there are infinitely many of them and you have to select which ones to mention. Since different sides prefer different facts, they can just as easily amount to a partisan shot as non-facts can. More, actually.
Beyond that, there is huge variation in how one phrases facts and how they relate to context. None of that is neutral or factual, even if the selected facts themselves are.
I don't think that this is a great example. The scandal was already out. His wife was already leaving him. The public already knows and already assumed lurid exploits. The rest is just details. It would be different if the decision to publicize this extortion attempt had been what caused his divorce.
> They are threatening to post photos of him sexting.
Is a photo published in a disreputable magazine significantly worse than the information already out so far which already got people thinking about him sexting anyway combined with losing custody of ~70 billion dollars in the coming divorce? I'm not so sure. Their privacy was already thoroughly invaded before this latest development.
It doesn't matter if it's worse. Going through a public divorce doesn't make one stop caring about an invasion of sexual privacy. It doesn't work like that.
> Is a photo published in a disreputable magazine significantly worse than the information already out so far which already got people thinking about him sexting anyway
Yes, unequivocally. I suspect any PR person would agree. You can doubt information published by a disreputable source, but most people believe the images they see, even in this deep faked era.
i don't know if "in the extreme". certainly not extreme enough to be extorted over. There is vastly worse things to be ashamed about, most people understand that other people are not flawless, esp. when it doesn't affect them.
To what bigot is "after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends" a scandal?
But if it was "HOT NEW SCANDAL! You'll NEVER believe who's getting a divorce!!!! Cha-ching!" then I'm sure a lot more people would call it a scandal and be inclined to read about it. Clickbait-y titles have been a thing for a long time, and AMI's (as well as basically all other gossipy) magazines use them practically every issue to try and get you to buy it.
Exactly - I'm trying to imagine being in his place and being open about all of this...and it's HARD. It's easy for me to want HIM to do it, but as much as I think being disgustingly wealthy would be great...I'm sure I'd still be really nervous about pressing that button.
And it's easy for us to say "Well I wouldn't be in that place to begin with", but as I much as I not be in this EXACT place, most of us have made mistakes that we deeply regret and fear getting out, or at least have the capability to. I don't have to assume I'd do this particular set of bad acts to be vulnerable. And once socially vulnerable, would money make it go away? No, not entirely, not enough. So how hard must it be for people who AREN'T disgustingly wealthy? Or even wealthy? Or even well-off?
Heck, with the quality of "deepfakes" or whatever now-a-days, all you need to do is find someone vulnerable to BEING vulnerable, and they don't even have to have done wrong. One marriage that has had no infidelity but is struggling, one person with a child/spouse who is suffering from serious depression/anxiety/suicidal/related issues. "hey, I have these pictures, and if you do X they don't have to see the light of day. You can deny them being real all you want...do you think that will really help?"
Or take the gross spectacle of releasing celebrity sex pics, or even just non-celebrity revenge pics. The only answer is for (1) we as a society to reject attempts to abuse this info and (2) to be less puritanical and judgmental about the victims here. To the Bezos example, one person can do wrong and we can oppose another using it to do wrong against them without condoning any of the original wrong.
Bezos has a hard time doing this, and it's far, far easier for him than for anyone else. I didn't care about his personal life before (note: Not the same as saying it doesn't matter) and I still don't, but even if I did I can find the blackmail efforts repugnant without letting adulterers off the hook.
During what appears to be an amicable divorce? With an age-appropriate woman? I'm not sure that rises to the level of "mistake," and certainly not to blackmailable acts.
AMI way overplayed their hand here, and we may yet find that they had gone all-in.
This isn't the 1950s. The conservative candidate in the last election is literally a serial philanderer. We're way past the point where the public at large is going to wring their hands about hum drum infidelity.
Blue Origin yanked a super bowl ad after it was disclosed Sanchez was involved in its production team (presumably she was not free, and the ad certainly wasn’t.) It was then shifted to Washington Post at the last minute, with a slapdash ad. [0]
> ... time on whatever he wants?
He can, but that time has to come from somewhere. It’s hard to believe Amazon is getting his full attention. He can own the stock, but I certainly question whether Amazon has a business-focused leader right now.
AMI picked the wrong person. Jeff, literally, has tons of money, extremely respected in the business world.
Forget about the embarrassment, if he secretly capitulates to this, then the real blackmail material would be the capitulation, not the photos. Cause if the owner of Washington Post bowed down to blackmail, every article published in the article will be called into question.
And who gives a shit if a billionaire cheated on his wife or sent dick pics. I don't care. Did he murder someone? Did he not divorce his wife by parting with half his fortune?
His wife supported him after he left his IB job to start Amazon. Amazon would not be without her in all probability. I argue Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support.
Jeff's parents supported him when he left his hedge fund job at D.E. Shaw. He was a quant and he had been there 4 years. He left his bonus on the table when he left but he was extremely well paid. He wasn't exactly hurting for cash.
It's already well established fact that Jeff's/Amazon's costs in the early days were paid for with his parents' life savings.
"The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Brad Stone, the author of the 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. “They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”
"In a 2010 commencement speech he gave at Princeton, Jeff himself acknowledged the gamble his wife had taken. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,” he said. “MacKenzie … told me I should go for it.” (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)"
And yet spousal support after a divorce isn't in the form of "yes, you should take the extremely risky move of living without my billions of dollars. I support your doing this."
Such are the perils of a billionaire's marriage dissolving in a community property state. Marriage and living in Washington state are voluntary actions. My argument was for more value of a partner's contributions to business success, regardless of statute.
EDIT: @busterarm: We're not going to agree on what defines "earned", good chat.
Yes, but then regulatory hazard isn't the same thing as earning the money. It's just being entitled to it.
Edit: I'm pretty sure Amazon shareholders won't agree with you about the definition of "earned" either. It's not just cash at stake here, it's voting power. Is that spousal support worth 8.5% control of the company? Up from 0%.
I'm not saying she isn't entitled to it, just that there's a difference between value through entitlement and value through work.
Not being sarcastic, but support for 20 years, is a bit far fetched. At some point after inception, Amazon was successful, even before it went public.
So are you saying Amazon rose in value because Jeff had the undying support of his wife?
I would say the support helped Jeff until the company was self-sustaining and successful. Of course, without the initial support of his wife, Amazon would not have started in the first place, or perhaps, started a bit late or grow a bit slowly. Think of the counter argument. If Jeff's wife was vehemently against it, Jeff did not start any company, and then after 20 years she divorced him, she would still get a share of his money. Do lawyers then argue that since she did not support him in his endeavors, she ought to bear some of his opportunity cost?
Day to day operations were taken care of by Jeff.
Extremely difficult decisions, ones that make or break a company were taken by Jeff.
Hiring and firing decisions were taken by Jeff.
Vision for the company originated with and sustained by Jeff.
I would not credit the wife with half of everything. Difficult to put a number to the situation. It's just sad.
I don't want this thread to devolve needlessly; in summary:
I treat my wife like my cofounder with an equal share of equity. I wouldn't let my cofounder take anything less than half of the total value of the business if a liquidation/separation/liquidity event occurred, so why would I treat my spousal relationship differently considering the work a relationship requires? If you're concerned about your partner entitled to half as not being equitable, you might consider your partner selection before the division of equity.
This applies whether I'm worth a thousand dollars, or a billion dollars.
EDIT: Was I being judgemental? It was intended more as "Choose Wisely" from Indiana Jones. As you mention sytelus, most of success is luck, but you can make every effort to pick the right partner.
Assume you need atleast $100K to start a business but you have only $90K. Your friend comes around and puts in $10K but only if you are willing to offer 50% ownership. Given no other choices, you agree and work your ass off for next 25 years to grow business to $100B while your friend did nothing else for it.
Does your friend deserve $50B? I am not asking from legal point of view because that answer would be yes. I am asking this from philosophical perspective. Clearly if your friend didn’t lend you $10K, you wouldn’t have your $100B business. But that’s the seed stage only work your friend did. Does he deserve fruits of your 25 years of labor? Does your friend deserve that stack because he took risk without knowledge of how future would turn out?
This is one the deepest question that has huge consequences all the way in to the concept of money, capital, debt, rewards, collaboration and purpose itself.
It's easy (and fun!) to go down the rabbit hole philosophically.
Does Jeff deserve billions of dollars more than the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees who have collectively built the company? Are their fruits of their labor worth so much less than his, regardless of Jeff's hard business decisions and many more hours per week worked, simply because of how equity is constructed and distributed? Jeff has clearly spent over 20 years building his company, nights, weekends, missed time with family he'll never get back, but can you point to the decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Jeff alone?
Value, its attribution, and its equitable distribution is hard, and executed in an imperfect fashion.
But capital alone is no indicator of ownership interest grants (see: advisors or key employees who are granted equity for their contributions [1]).
Rewards in capitalism are to those who can convince others of value provided in exchange for an equity interest; capital is only a small part of that. Lots of equity is sweat equity!
"She believes she is worth all her money, she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions. Anyone who disagrees is a hater. You're just jealous. "No, she's a fool!" Then how come she's so rich?
Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is [..] The standard criticism of her is that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her brother"-- but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing-- even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid in stock options. What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them.
[..] even her haters want the money to mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed reality testing and instead creates a new reality, it uses the truth in order to lie: of course I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value based on his labor. I'm rich because that's what I'm worth. "Isn't that specious reasoning?" Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock.*
And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense. To her haters Randi is a buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money; Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self worth. She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else. So she's disparaged in a specific way: she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother."
I have seen this go both ways. Some spouses give everything for other to succeed while some become extra work in addition to what you already have. Lot depends on circumstances, personallies and loads of luck. Let’s not be judgmental here.
> Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support.
No, Jeff's wife was not in the room making the business decisions that were needed to be made to amass their fortune.
Let's say she watched the kids and maintained the house with no help. That's a mighty contribution, but there are other stay at home spouses that do that too who would be entitled to far less in a separation solely because of the money their partner has made.
So why does she get billions and the average stay at home divorcee gets thousands? Was her contribution to the family a million times more valuable than the average stay at home spouse?
No, Jeff made the money and she's entitled to half. They both knew that going in and know that now. She didn't earn billions through parenting that was so much better than anyone else or create that much more value than the average spouse, but she is entitled to half by law.
To put it another way, if they had signed a prenup and he had paid her $1000/hr 24/7 for 30 years, she would have earned $262 million. Or about 250 times less than the ~$65 billion she could get.
Instead, she walks away with having made about $290k per hour every hour every day for the 25 years they were married. That's a lot of support.
Let’s go ahead and not debate this. You won’t come to a satisfactorily equitable answer, no one will change their minds and we’ll just have a thread of gray comments where nothing of value was gained.
If you count the weight of the servers required to service all the funds at the institutions his money resides at, and the percentage of his funds compared to the overall amount at that institution, it still might be tons.
Looking at descriptions of those photos, I honestly don't understand why it's even such a big deal. And I suspect that it's not nearly as big of a deal to Bezos as the blackmailers thought it would be. Perhaps a little projection at play.
Who knows why anyone thought it might have been a big deal. I can imagine reasons. Maybe not all the photos were exchanged with Sanchez. Maybe those descriptions are sufficient to identify the photos within Bezos' collection, but the description doesn't include the most salacious details.
Agreed, if he gave into the request this time, it would have only escalated. Fast forward in time. Oh, we also want you to remove this article, or stop talking about that subject. If you now disagree, not only will we release the photos, but it'll also become public that you've been our puppet for years, and both you and the Washington Post have no credibility and everything you've written in the past cannot be trusted.
I imagine this was the goal. They have some nude photos which are embarrassing and a chance for them to get in the door. If they could get Bezos and Washington Post to bow down on that, they'd have much more power and leverage going forward that could potentially destroy them both. Bezos called them out, and now all they have are these fairly meaningless Bezos nudes, which are not in the highest of demand.
I heard some people suggesting that it was a really poor move to blackmail Bezos in writing. However, if you believe the above, then it makes perfect sense. They wanted a very clean paper trail of their requests, Bezos and the Washington Post accepting the offer, and the future outcome of those actions. This would provide them with blackmail material much more valuable than the photos.
The whole affair reminds me of nothing so much as that scene in "The Dark Knight" that ends with Lucius Fox saying ". . . and your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck."
David Letterman laid out the details of a blackmail attempt on air a several years ago. If memory serves, he had been having sex with a young staffer on his show. These sorts of blackmail blowbacks happen from time to time, and it's always people who are very secure - either with money or social status or both - who are able to pull them off.
I remember David Letterman doing just that. Apparently that's the conventional wisdom on this sort of thing: announce it yourself rather than let the other person take the first public move.
"proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter"
That's the richest guy in the world saying "I don't give a XXXX what it costs, find out who did it."
It's also the moment in your life when, if you get the result that guys wants, he'll be glad to write you a cheque for $20,000,000 and will be happy to do so and he won't be interested in why the number is that high.
That gave me chills, and the phrase, If you’re going to shoot the king, you’d better be goddamned sure you’re going to kill him flashed through my mind. Well, they missed spectacularly, and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
I think Omar, Stringer and Machiavelli would have gotten along on some level.
"Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge." -Machiavelli
It’s amazing how many people in Trump’s inner circle love quoting mob movies, calling people “rats” and “stoolies” but can’t seem to get down even the basics of being a half-decent criminal. I mean, Roger Stone literally told people to lie to Congress via an email.
One can quote mob movies all day but that doesn’t make them a smart criminal.
I mean, they've lived in an era when being a white collar criminal is basically without legal penalty (as long as you're a white guy). It's really no wonder so many of them are so completely stupid, they would've had nothing to fear if their guy hadn't gotten himself elected.
There is a good reason for this. Real criminals don't aspire to be criminals... they just are, for whatever reason, necessity or lack of certain morals.
People who idolize criminals show an entirely different character defect, one that is in opposition to being productive in any task criminal or otherwise.
Random but sorta relevant:
In the video game Morrowind, there's a king who wears the best ring in the game - it provides constant life and stamina regeneration. The only way to take it is to kill him. But you better be prepared to fight a room full of very powerful guards. You better be prepared when you go at him.
Indeed! Even I was quite fascinated by that phrase. I really wonder if AMI folks did any what-if analysis before shooting off those e-mails. At least the best-case and worst-case scenarios if not exploring all possible branches.
I mean come on, you are literally taking on the richest person on earth and didn't even evaluate implications!? Just to belabor the point, he's not only the richest person right now, he's among the top 15[1] wealthiest persons of human civilization. And you are threatening him with, what, a bunch of nudish images and adult text messages!?
> and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
It’s generally not blackmail to threaten someone with some action that, by itself, is legal. See, for example, the many civil settlements where rich people stop the people they raped from going to the police. And I’m unsure what the status is on publishing salacious private photos. Sure, there is a copyright issue. But that’s a civil matter, not criminal.
If it were a crime, it really wouldn’t be much of a threat because they’d be unlikely to follow through, would they?
Edit: there is one federal law where threatening embarrassment is enough, but that requires a demand for money or property, which this is explicitly not.
And because the downvotes are already rolling in: Note that I find this just as abhorrent as you do, and that sexploitation should absolutely be a crime. But the legal situation unfortunately is not at all as clear as the moral one. And the replies below are mostly embarrassing in that nobody even seems to have a clue on the difference between civil and criminal law. Carry on then...
> Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal embarrassing, disgraceful or damaging information about a person to the public, family, spouse or associates unless money is paid to purchase silence. It is a form of extortion. Because the information is usually substantially true, it is not revealing the information that is criminal, but demanding money to withhold it.
Wikipedia says this: Blackmail is an act of coercion using the threat of revealing or publicizing either substantially true or false, and often damaging, information about a person, to the public, family members, or associates unless certain demands are met.
It seems its considered blackmail but in the strictly legal sense I'm not sure. There's probably a law to cover that though, extortion?
It only needs to be “something of value”... often money, but I think most reasonable people can see the potential value of the requested statement from Jeff Bezos.
Now if AMI wanted you or I to say those statements I’m not sure how valuable they’d be.
To elaborate, "something of value" is the language from the federal law. Under Washington state law, blackmail explicitly includes demands for services.
I would think that the demand for
a public statement would qualify, however, I'm not a lawyer, and this case is unusual enough that I would not be confident in my personal interpretation of the law.
Correct. And it's important to note that AMI's claim that they could publish the photos at all is dubious at best. Whoever took the photos (presumably Bezo and/or his girlfriend) holds the copyright to the images and fair use only allows them to be reproduced by AMI if they're newsworthy. AMI claims the photos are newsworthy because they speak to his business judgment which is a serious stretch for the photos of Bezos and completely irrelevant with respect to the photos of his girlfriend.
> It’s generally not blackmail to threaten someone with some action that, by itself, is legal.
That's entirely untrue. The downvotes are rolling in because your assertion about blackmail is simply wrong. There are a myriad of local, state, and federal laws on blackmail that cover situations like this.
Blackmail can involve any threats to coerce using private materials, not just for financial objectives.
Whatever you think about Jeff, this is the correct way to handle such things. We should all have the same character in such a situation (despite how the situation arose; in this case via an affair). Jeff has MANY other issues of moral disfortitude (we all do to some degree, though not at these scales). However, this particular event is to be applauded and emulated.
This sounds too bad to be true , but if true i think it's how any sensible person should handle it. I mean, a dik pik who will care a month later. Did they really think that such misguided extortion would work? It really doesn't make much sense unless someone else was pushing forward this extortion
I'm gonna guess that the National Enquirer knows what the response will be when they say "we'll release your pics". They probably weren't expecting this move by bezos
Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon/Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer's digital assets for forensic purposes.
I'm not sure if you are joking, but that's exactly what they should not be doing. They also can't just go poke around their customer's data. That would be very unwise...
Well come on - don't host your business on a company you plan on antagonizing. Pretty sure AWS has contract clauses that allow them to deny service or perform forensics when criminal activity is suspected, and blackmail would certainly qualify.
Pretty sure that AWS doesn't have permission to conduct criminal investigations. Those would need to be turned over to a criminal prosecutor. It would be a pretty scary world if corporations were able to police consumer and business data whenever they "suspected" something. Talk about political hit jobs.
(I think) the parent comment is implying that you might explicitly give such permission to amazon by agreeing to their terms when purchasing service.
even if that isn't the case, the amount of effort required for amazon to obtain a warrant from a magistrate judge or however they'd play it is negligible.
Why does it need to meet the bar of a criminal investigation?
All they need to do is to tick one of the boxes in their ToS and kick them off their property. Heck, there's an entire sub-category of law colloquially known as "Amazon-law", where you hire folks who specialize in navigating the intricacies of Amazon's policies so your business doesn't get crushed:
No Illegal, Harmful, or Offensive Use or Content
You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for any illegal, harmful, fraudulent, infringing or offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is illegal, harmful, fraudulent, infringing or offensive. Prohibited activities or content include:
Illegal, Harmful or Fraudulent Activities. Any activities that are illegal, that violate the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others, our operations or reputation, including disseminating, promoting or facilitating child pornography, offering or disseminating fraudulent goods, services, schemes, or promotions, make-money-fast schemes, ponzi and pyramid schemes, phishing, or pharming.
Infringing Content. Content that infringes or misappropriates the intellectual property or proprietary rights of others.
Offensive Content. Content that is defamatory, obscene, abusive, invasive of privacy, or otherwise objectionable, including content that constitutes child pornography, relates to bestiality, or depicts non-consensual sex acts.
Our Monitoring and Enforcement
We reserve the right, but do not assume the obligation, to investigate any violation of this Policy or misuse of the Services or AWS Site.
They don't need to change a thing! It is already there:
> You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for... content that violate the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others, our operations or reputation...
Character assassination of the chief head of AWS is damaging to the reputation of AWS in no uncertain terms.
Don't we have that now? People expect universities, for example, to have some sort of shadow legal system to investigate crimes that occur on campus (such as sexual assault).
It would actually be fantastic PR for AWS if the DoJ obtained a warrant and then they fought the warrant to protect their customer, showing just how far they'll go to protect their customers, even the ones they hate.
Blackmail and extortion is 100% against AWS terms of service, so they would be within their rights to discontinue service. I do agree that they gain nothing by doing so.
This kind of defeats the purpose of Probable Cause. AWS would only fight the subpoena if it was overly broad and could materially impact many customers. In this case, I want to see AMI taken down.
We're at a point in time where the public, politicians and the tech community itself are becoming wary of tech monopolies. Currently Amazon has avoided the brunt of it (mostly due to being consumer friendly unlike Facebook) and the scrutiny it has had, has been focused on it's retail business.
Bezos booting someone off AWS would bring a ton of public scrutiny to an even more powerful monopoly, one that the public and politicians are by and large ignorant of. Plus it would (rightly) shake the tech community out of its complacency around cloud lock in and encourage us to explore solutions. (I realise there's already a lot of good work happening around this, but it's not an issue I've seen the wider industry talking about much)
It's worth noting that Jeff Bezos has a lot to gain from publishing these threats. While publishing the descriptions of the photographs may sting, publishing the photos themselves would hurt a lot more. Now that he's made the accusations public, AMI could not plausibly publish the actual photos.
They won't publish them. But I'll guarantee you they will anonymously leak out on the internet. There is no way to prove they are the only people with these photos. (and they of course aren't the only ones)
Can Bezos get a US court to impound the photos? Something akin to the UK 'super injunction'?
That would make being caught leaking the photos perjury. The stakes are so high that AMI might well not dare to do that.
Its easy to imagine that Bezos, whatever he is saying publicly, is also getting excellent legal consul privately and that two can play at the games that AMI is so infamous for.
All 50 States have statutes that allow for preliminary injunctions... If Bezos filed a lawsuit he could absolutely seek a court order restraining AMI from publishing the photos pending the outcome of a lawsuit. See, for example: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=7.40.020
Why? Because he doesn't want everyone to know that he has a penis?
The kind of people who care about "celebrity gossip" will have no idea who he is, and the people who do know who he is won't care. There is no market for these photos.
We all hate when the big guys use lawsuits to stifle the little guys, but getting AMI execs tied up in legal worries and costs seems, in this instance, to have popular appeal?
Revenge porn laws seem like a valid counterpoint to the Streisand Effect. Even without that, you’re going to share his nudes just because he doesn’t want you to? Gross.
I don't see how much public availability of such photos could hurt him. He's already divorcing. He probably had to accept many humbling things about himself over last few years.
The only thing those photos would change is undeniably confirm that richest man on the planet has actual human male body and some love life, which pretty much everyone already suspected.
Some people will get a kick of it but it will eventually blend into the background same as fappening or a photo of a hole in the sock of president of world bank.
You are giving too much credit to dirtbags. These photos will be routed to persons that are 45th degree from him and released aka leaked for free. Don't underestimate the power of revenge :|
Bezos himself writes, in the article we're discussing:
I asked him to prioritise protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter. - emphasis mine.
And that:
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
Thus making it plain, simple, and obvious, that he recognises that having a net worth up around the US$137 billion[1] mark has it's perks.
I think the user you’re asking tried to explain that not everyone has the means to handle things in such a way.
Fair point, but obviously someone like Bezos should be able to make use of his resources in cases like these and I‘m sure nobody is arguing against that.
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
You’re right, most people are never going to face such an adversary personally.
But there are legions of other adversaries, at all sorts of levels, who are out to pray on almost anyone with a bit of money / fame.
In order to be blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments, you do not need to have a lot of money. They don't really care about that, because they also have a lot of money.
What they care about is whether you have something that poses a danger to their (hidden) agendas.
If this is true, it may also mean that it is more likely that you have a lot of money (because there appears to be a statistical correlation between having lots of money and having stuff that's dangerous to the agendas of state-level global actors, likely because having lots of money means having lots of power and influence, which results in getting access to "stuff" you wouldn't have otherwise), but the former does not automatically result in the latter, and it also isn't a requirement for the latter.
Hence you can very well, through an infinite amount of random circumstances, come into possession of material deemed "dangerous" by the US and Saudi governments, while still being just a normal person living a normal life with a 5-digit net worth. Resulting in you being blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments. Most likely with quite some success.
But if humanity as a whole enforced social norms that rewarded blackmail-refusals, then the value of blackmailing would drop so low as to be not worth it and extremely uncommon.
Essentially we could develop a herd immunity to blackmail.
Imagine if the material contained morally grey stuff, like something politically incorrect. Not even illegal - just monetary support for some alt right figure or someone.
Then imagine if the material was about this other woman before he got his divorce.
Then imagine if the material contained actual borderline illegal stuff or something like photos of his nieces on a beach holiday.
So in a nutshell, "Imagine if instead of normal pics they were of weird shit that might be illegal?" There isn't enough time in the world for me to think about that line of inquiry.
"Imagine if instead of simply walking down the street you punched everybody you passed."
Having read the whole thing, man Jeff Bezos has a great deal of courage.
It helps to be backed by untold wealth but here is a guy who stands tall in the face of ghastly behaviour and in the face of deep personal embarrassment.
I'm going to push back against this characterization as "ghastly personal behavior". For one, it's not clear if he and his wife were already separated, at least at a personal level, before this affair. But this general idea that it's somehow "ghastly" to send a paramour love notes and sexually suggestive pictures is a sad remnant of our puritanical history, and the sooner we rid ourselves of this notion, the better.
Anyone with a job has means, more agencies just need to start thinking of it as a pipeline business. You can even go as low as to threaten to dox various meme authors for instance, unless they start paying $10/mo into a fund. Get enough of them over enough time and the methods used to de-anonymize or uncover whatever other information you want to charge people for the privilege of not releasing will pay for themselves.
not exactly tabloid blackmail, but 'revenge porn' was and is still prevalent on the internet, and I don't doubt that a lot of small scale blackmail happens as well, and if I would guess I think many of the affected people have very little recourse.
The problem I have with most super rich people is that they consider genuine risk far less important than potential embarrassment. E.g. they won't dare taking a stand politically because of the chance that someone will go public with some scandalous nonsense. Bezos on the other hand seems willing to calculate differently. I have to say, this has changed my opinion of him a lot in his favour. On the very remote chance you're reading this Jeff, good on you!
Taken from the point of view of the divorce court, this is a LOT more ammo for his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her side. These photos are very soon to hit the greater web/papers and WILL be used against him in the proceedings.
You are correct, this decision by him to speak out is likely to cost him Billions.
Why should his wife get more or less than half of their common property (Washington is a community property state) regardless of who had an affair with who? They're both multi-billionaires and will live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
I think they are pretty mature about their divorce. I'd assume they just split things in half, because they built it together anyways. Seems pretty straight forward - I doubt their will be any public drama.
Nah. The public nature and embarrassment of the reveal may be a factor, as plenty of marriages survive cheating - and there are plenty of cheaters who don't get caught.
All the money in the world can't buy your pride / dignity back, especially if some "embarrassing" evidence get out there.
It's something in the way people would look at you, talk about you, etc ...
If you combine that with the Streisand effect, there's no way a public figure can take this kind of hit and walk away unphased. It's very much human nature, and that's why Jeff's move is bold.
A good reply might have been, "Sorry, Mr. Pecker, but I'm not interested in working with you on this. But I'd suggest you hold off for a couple of weeks before releasing those photos. Playgirl has an exclusive on them in their next issue, and their lawyers are probably better than yours."
Agreed. Bezos gained more respect (in my eyes, and I'm delighted to see a lot of others too!) by the way he's handling this than anything that could be lost by the "reveals". (My own carefactor is zero).
In fact offering the full text of the extortion attempt shows true courage, and at the same time claims back all the power the items might have had.
It just makes me despise these dickheads even more and totally root (the Australian version) for Bezos - go get them!!
> All the money in the world can't buy your pride / dignity back, especially if some "embarrassing" evidence get out there.
AFAIK we are talking about a naked pic. If that was really so dangerous, people would never take naked selfies in the first place. I think it's hyperbole, even by american's puritan standards
I suppose it is heavily dependent on one's personality and what one has actually been caught on camera doing. But assuming your average sexytime pics, if some of me were made public, I'd care very little about it. If someone started looking at me funny over it, I'd laugh at them; if my boss or someone else with power were to be a prudish twit, changing jobs would be a hassle, but that's the worst I could imagine, and, eh, I'm lucky that doing so isn't as huge a deal as it is for some.
I do of course realize that things can be very different for people in different positions, and of course sextortion of minors is a very different thing. But for someone reasonably secure both financially and emotionally, who cares? Only the sort of people I don't willingly spend time around anyway.
I don't know Bezos, but he's certainly OK financially, and this reaction seems to demonstrate emotional competence, too.
One thought did occur to me is that he is basically daring AMI to release the pictures. What if he knows the providence of these pictures, knows how they got into AMI hands, and knows that if AMI publish them he can sue them, Gawker (not Buzzfeed) style, into the ground?
If AMI committed a crime by threatening to post them if he didn't keep quiet, and he posted this, AMI definitely also committed a crime if they then posted the pictures in retaliation.
Bezos is reasonably safe in airing this, because AMI will only dig itself a deeper hole if they post them. AMI botched the crud out of this operation by leaving a paper trail: They made accepting their offer completely unnecessary; I don't think there's any chance the pictures get posted now.
The "Principle of Least Regret" is an excellent way to make decisions, particularly binary ones:
Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets?
You then commit to the path that you currently judge minimises your future contrition.
The very literal minded will take this at face value and miss the point of the construct, which is that having committed to a given path you have minimised your regret even if it turns out to be the wrong choice. Because you can look back and say "given the information I had, it looked like the right one". Which is another way of saying, "if I had my time again, I'd do it the same way", only now with rational evidence of this claim.
Thus turning confirmation bias into an affirmative and effective decision tool, by preforming the outcome around it.
If you follow this procedure, you may still turn out unhappy, but you won't blame yourself. It is especially recommended for people who may otherwise experience chronic decision paralysis comorbidly with crippling imposter syndrome.
>Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets?
One practical issue with this advice is that it can lead to the "death of a thousand cuts" where any single binary event can be weighed one way but over the course of thousands of iterations, the aggregate would be weighed the opposite.
Sure, in theory one would take into account all possible futures where this could happen but in practical terms that is a tough thing to do and there is seldom a good point to stop.
That hasn't been a problem in practice. What you're describing makes it sound like The Dice Man, but decision regret hasn't turned out to be an aggregate function. Under the POLR framework each past decision becomes a sunk cost; each committed decision is the new baseline.
On the other hand I tend only to apply it for substantial life decisions. Quitting my job to launch a startup; getting married; moving to another country (x4); not eating the entire cheesecake; choosing Vim over Emacs etc.
Where at the end once the mc has the new ability, she can see her painful future, and yet she accepts it because, well, what can you do about predestination? Had me thinking, if an individual could perceive time non-linearly, would they see their future folly, and yet perform the same mistakes, at peace with their actions?
Really? I'm at the other extreme: blackmailing me would be pointless as there would be no gain (not to mention in my boring case any unclad selfies would have to be synthesized).
And in the current world[+] there's so much exposure that such pictures will be drowned out by the sheer volume of stuff. Yes, we're still at a point where politicians can lose their jobs because of racialist photos or certain indiscretions, but at least the "indiscretions" have less and less power over non-politicians (actual bad deeds still do, but that's not an issue here).
And these pictures are all about consensual behavior that isn't extraordinary. There's not even a scandal.
[+] or in what I can imagine is a linear projection of today's world forward only a few years from now
This could become a replay of Peter Thiel episode, with Bezos destroying the tabloid or at least seriously wounding it.
Morality aside, I don't have any sympathy for tabloids like these. What bothers me is I don't think much will change, even if Bezos wins here. As long as the public has voracious appetite for celebrity juicy stories, someone will find a way to feed it.
I think there's an important distinction between Gawker and Pecker's rag. I get that people hate both for being celebrity gossip slime-factories, but only one of them seems to make a habit of extortion and (at the very least) gray-hat political operations.
The distinction is subtle I admit. Racist depictions would be a white person playing a nonwhite character (e.g. Fu Manchu, Tonto or Othello), or Shakespear's depiction of Shylock.
Racialism -- pretending or willfully wanting to believe that there are actual meaningful racial distinctions differences -- you can see in the photos of lynchings, slave era laws in the slave states etc. I think most of the people in those photos knew they were wrong, just as I believe some of those old laws I've read were written by people who knew they were wrong. Likewise modern laws that happen to "coincidentally" exclude some sections of the population from voting.
I believe some racist comments and representations can be innocent (though in this day and age, quite few IMHO) and they can also be intended to send a message (e.g. neither Alexander Hamilton nor Aaron Burr were black; you could purposefully either neuter or hyper-extend the portrayal of Shylock to make a point).
> If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)
Sounds like precisely why he felt the buck had to stop somewhere.
Slightly off topic, but the fact that the world's richest man who owns a tech giant chose to publish this on a closed platform like Medium should be worrisome for the future of the open web. On the other hand, this might just be the biggest brand endorsement for Medium till date.
I mean, Amazon doesn't really have an associated "official" blogging platform, not in the way that Google has Blogger, Yahoo has Tumblr, and Twitter has Medium. Also worth noting that Amazon's spokesperson used Medium when writing a rebuttal to a high-profile investigation of Amazon's business practices in 2015: https://medium.com/@jaycarney/what-the-new-york-times-didn-t...
Blogger and Tumblr aren't like Medium; maybe a good comparison for them would be Wordpress. Twitter's official blog isn't on Medium. So doesn't "have" it -
blog.twitter.com
I am glad that Jeff Bezos is aggressively going after AMI for their scummy behavior. I was also glad that Peter Thiel aggressively went after Gawker Media for their scummy behavior. Sometimes these badly behaving media outlets need to have a billionaire personally invested in stopping their bad behavior.
>I didn’t know much about most of that a few weeks ago when intimate texts messages from me were published in the National Enquirer. I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer. As it turns out, there are now several independent investigations looking into this matter.
AMI showed up on Bezos's rader after they published his intimate text messages. Gawker showed up on Thiel's radar after they outed him. They both then went investigating to see if there was some illegal activity that these media companies were engaged in.
I mean, that is if Medium doesn't run out of money in the next ~18 months. It's been a savage series of pivots to get to here, and even then, I'm not sure if it's actually sustainable.
The title does this post a misservice. This is way, way more interesting than you might think, and I highly recommend following the link and reading the whole thing.
The "I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter" part gives off pretty strong "money is no object" vibes haha.
He specifically calls attention to the fact that his wealth is one reason he was able to speak out about this:
> If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)
Interesting attempt to blackmail someone (who in this case happens to be, you know, the richest man in the world), with information that is generally public already. All that would have been added were a few additional pictures. How much extra public embarrassment is going to come from that?
Apparently AMI and David Pecker's non-prosecution agreement for the Michael Cohen stuff is contingent on them not continuing to do crime. So i guess that's out the window now.
Blackmail is a law which forbids the possessor of some information from offering to sell it to the subject of the information. The possessor can sell it to anyone else in the world, but cannot offer to the subject.
If I had an affair with a celebrity, I can start a bidding war for my story between all the movies studios, television studios, and publishing houses. That's legal. If I invite the celebrity to bid, then I've committed a crime.
I've always found it hard to justify blackmail laws.
Weird, i always found it hard to justify the legality of either that type of bidding war or the operations and structure of an organisation that would participate it one.
I think blackmail is obviously wrong as is sensationalism and appealing to base desires over informing people. i am not sure where laws should apply, but these appear to be important levers in the control of our society we should pay special attention to due to their ability to enable and empower the unscrupulous. If we dont have laws to govern these thing we must accept the responsibility of society to educate everyone to a high standard (as an independent thinker, more than a rule follower) to mitigate the severe risk in this area.
What you describe isn’t blackmail. Blackmail is offering the celebrity the chance to keep you from offering the story to the others, in exchange for a fee.
If you actually had a setup as you described, all of the news outlets would publish the facts of your story, without paying you anything, because facts aren’t protected by copyright. The only thing you could sell would be an exclusive interview.
So it's an ordering problem? It's only blackmail if I offer to sell my silence before making offers to other parties? So if I have an offer from a movie studio for the rights to my story and then allow the celebrity to make a counter-offer, that's not blackmail?
When I said publishing house I meant book publishers like Penguin Random House. I don't know where news outlets come into it.
You’re not offering the same thing to the publisher and the celebrity. To the publisher, you’re offering your version of certain currently unknown events that they may be interested in publishing. You’ll need to disclose the basic facts first before they will know if they even want to buy. To the celebrity, you’re offering the promise not to disclose even those basic facts to anyone, even to explain what it is you’re offering to other parties.
Whether the medium is a book or a newspaper or a website is legally immaterial. Thinking about the information as news is just useful because no one owns the facts, only their particular descriptions of them.
Only analysis that matters in the end is the judge's. That's why when you're operating with something like that hanging over your head, you should keep your nose clean.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who sidestep trouble with a deal like that, and then go right out and burn it up like idiots. I just don't get it?
the paparazzi exist in a 1st amendment gray area. they cover public figures but the newsworthy nature of their salacious stories and gathering tactics are always getting challenged in court.
We are all human. Nobody wins this 'moral crusade' that takes up so much airtime.
We should be much more focused on the existential threats that the entire biosphere is dealing with, not the 'dick pics' of the world's richest man. He's just another dude at his core it seems, happens to be founder of Amazon though.
Your respect is misplaced. Amazon has some of the worst business practices of any company its size. They region shop. They mix inventory. They engage in anti-competitive behaviour. They use their position as a platform to influence their competitive business objectives. They exploit OSS in a manner that is technically, maybe legal but essentially against the idea of the license. They force companies to buy out counterfeits of their own goods just to stop a mandatory reduction in their price. They do not allow you to remove a product from Amazon once it has been put up for sale by anyone that isn't you and then they have the gall to talk all high minded about investments in education while they (or their founder) pay almost nothing in tax.
Bezos can get fucked. He's worse than Thiel[0] or Andreessen.[1] Those two only committed a single capital sin each.
And I know it shouldn't mean a damn thing but I'm going to say it anyway, I've never worked with APIs or CLIs as infuriating as AWS's. They're horrible. The documentation is horrible. The service is over-priced and horrible, with unexpected caps and delays and fees that you only hit once you're starting to scale.
Fuck Amazon and fuck Bezos. He's like an Elon Musk without the class or philosophy.
[0] Thiel and his self-serving, false-but-seemingly-naive libertarianism and hypocritical support of Trump.
[1] Andreessen's support for the NSA's lies to congress about what they were doing. I don't support Snowden's actions—they were far too reckless—but I also don't support blatant lies to congress. We either have a democracy or we don't and we shouldn't be lied to. A simple "that is classified" is sufficient, and Andreessen calling Snowden a traitor because "we all know it was going on anyway" is the admission of a kleptocrat or oligarch of their privileged, beguiling position.
Edit:
Amazon is a plague. I invite the downvotes, Bezos bots or not. Nobody disagrees with what I've outlined because it's fundamentally true. Amazon is fucking trash.
Regardless of what you've typed, at least don't outright lie and completely expose your troll. A fundamental truth is 2+2=4, and the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. What is typed above is not.
You're really calling a user who joined in 2008 with 12k karma a troll? I think it's nonsense that parent's opinion against Bezos was flagged, instead of the erudite references to Batman and The Wire in these comments.
Nobody is perfect. Gandhi was apparently racist and John Lennon was an egomaniac, I admire them both still for their efforts to make the world better than what it was before.
Bezos still a human being like me and like you, whether you love him or hate him. I didn't say he cured cancer but last I checked, he puts ONE BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR into Blue Origin to help our species keep evolving towards a spacefaring civilization. How many other people are doing that?
I am aware of the grey-area Amazon operates in but it's still better than the oligarchs before Big Tech. I'll give my money to Amazon before Wal-Mart, I know that. Amazon invests billions of dollars in retraining warehouse employees who are getting replaced by automation for high-demand jobs. Amazon didn't have to do that, but they made a decision to and I'm sure Bezos signed off on it.
If you disagree with Amazon and AWS that much, build something better.
Grey area? They mixed inventory and forced Apple to sue them to stop counterfeit goods from poising the public consciousness. They routinely fuck over small businesses by copying their products or allowing false inventory to compete with them.
Show me some real proof that Amazon is retraining warehouse employees with skills into high-demand jobs. It will be the first I'll hear of it.
As for building something better, doing nothing would suffice. They're a net-negative on the world. I'm not so negative on any other tech company. Most have redeemable qualities, but AZ doesn't. They're a brutally bad company and their founder is central to the problem. They're 10–100x worse than Facebook.
That's a subjective opinion. Amazon started out as a book store and I love books, so I naturally stuck with them from the late 90's til now. It's an incredible story to go from next to dead to where they are today. Only bigger 'comeback' is probably Apple, another company you probably hate. Right?
Facebook is the next AOL or Yahoo, just a matter of time now. People are loyal until they aren't, then they'll leave in droves. The reverse 'early adopter' stage is already happening...
Nobody is perfect, but when the person's "main thing" is objectionable then it seems pretty normal to be critical of that person! It's the difference between "My teacher committed adultry" and "this loan shark's entire reason to exist is to scam people out of their money"
You see Blue Origin as "moving towards a spacefaring civilization", I see it as "rich person plays with money gotten by aggressively underpaying everyone involved in his enterprise"
It's like Bill Gates giving to charity. Sure, it's better for him to give than not to. But we can also just take the money and improve society no matter what the whims of a single person. Why do we give billionaires the choice to hoard away their money at all? What purpose does it serve?
For every Gates there's a hundred Elisions, who decide that the money should go towards buying Hawaii and mega yachts instead of curing malaria.
Does Amazon do more good for society or bad? Serious question. I wonder this a lot. Can they be blamed for wanting to create something better than Wal-Mart? Can they be blamed for the fact that shareholders expect growth and customers expect lower prices all the time? Is this not a bigger problem than just blaming the billionaires for all of society's woes? Aren't all of us complicit for buying and supporting Big Tech in our day-to-day lives?
Fair points. I don't have the answers. I'm curious to find out like the rest of us though.
What are people expecting? The billionaires give up their money, redistribute it into the 'common good' and all our problems will go away? Yeah, I'm sorry but I think this situation is more complicated than that.
If we made a pro con list, what would you say are Amazon's greatest negatives to society? It saves people time and money, and AWS has enabled many start ups and small businesses. I can't think of any big negatives other than the general hate that people have towards big companies.
The only negative I can think of is 'monopolistic tendency'. Yet, this is almost inevitable for any prolifically innovative company like Apple or Alphabet.
I happen to like Peter Thiel a lot and agree with most of his perspectives. I'm not sure if punishing an extremely forward-thinking organization is the way forward for our society.
I don't know. I'm hungry to find out though. What are your thoughts on this?
I would agree about the 'monopolistic tendencies' but I don't think that's necessarily bad. Monopolies are not inherently bad. Being anti competitive and trying to coerce consumers is bad. But, by and large, Amazon is a "monopoly" because they offer a better product/service than everyone else at a better price.
In other words, bad behavior that's bad for the consumer is highly correlated with monopolies, but not synonymous. Sometimes companies grow large exactly because they are good for the consumer and so consumers prefer them.
Related to that, I think a lot of the negative feelings toward Amazon come from a fear about the power that Amazon holds as such a huge company without substantial competition. And while they do have a lot of power, I've not seen abuses from them that would warrant such fear.
Politics is about alliances, and I can fight against Bezos' shitty business behavior while also supporting his fighting back against those who would scandalize common social behavior (yes, sexting is normal), and exploit the threat of scandal for undue gain.
The Post, along with the Times, has been pursuing and reporting a story that David Pecker, AMI's CEO, has been working with a Saudi go-between, in part as an effort to expand their business. More importantly, Jamal Khashoggi, who we now know almost beyond a reasonable doubt† was targeted by Mohammad Bin Salman before Saudi assassins murdered him in Turkey (most probably at MBS's behest), was a Post employee.
† Reports emerged today that there's apparently audio of MBS himself ruminating over having him murdered.
How does that explain Pecker's rage at the WaPo digging into AMI's Saudi connection, though?
Nearly everyone who wants funding at this scale hits up the Saudis. Describing that AMI looked for funding with the Saudi royals doesn't strike me as a particularly significant reveal; Musk did it relatively recently, and he wasn't excoriated for it. How is news that AMI is doing it worthy of a push-all-the-chips-into-the-pot move like AMI pulled?
Now if Bezos' private investigation team is getting close to some kind of Kryptonite like Pecker personally authorized his staff to assist with encouraging Khashoggi to visit the Saudi's Turkish embassy as a favor to the royals to try to ingratiate himself and angle for a funding pitch, then I could understand Pecker's reaction. Even if Pecker and AMI didn't know the Saudi's intent, it would indeed be very awkward for AMI and the Saudis. The other direction this could be going is the Saudis are directing AMI via cut-outs to dissuade any deeper investigation into Khashoggi's death, and miscalculated Bezos' mettle.
I wonder if AMI overplayed the "Bezos cheated in his marriage!1!1" angle, too. If there is more or less a collective shoulder shrug that billionaire POTUS DJT cheated on Melania, I'm not clear what AMI thought the impact would be on Amazon's public opinion that its billionaire founder/leader is doing the same.
This type of response is quite common when investigating criminal masterminds: Maximum outrage; Blatant denial; Threatening retaliation if the investigation is not halted immediately.
Whether or not Pecker is a criminal mastermind is for the courts to say, but his response does him no favors in the public eye and in the press.
You're seem to ignoring what AMI was demanding from Bezos/WaPo. Wanting funding from Saudis is no big deal, unless you compromise your core business to do this sell-out. Maybe the deal would have fallen through with it becoming public? Why do we need any much bigger conspiracy?
A little less than a year ago, AMI/National-Enquirer published a 100 page ad-free magazine dedicated to the praise of MBS and the Saudi Kindgom [1]
The Saudis claimed they had no involvement in it, although an Associate Press investigation revealed that it had circulated among Saudis weeks before publication [2]
This issue was distributed at supermarkets across the United States.
Whether there was an untoward arrangement behind it might be under investigation.
> If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they say they’ll publish the photos, and quickly. And there’s an associated threat: They’ll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from that lie.
They never explicitly say that, do they? I'm not enough of a lawyer to know if what they did still counts as extortion/blackmail, but as far as I can see they simply describe the photos, and propose an agreement that would prevent them from publishing the photos. But they never say "Do this or we'll publish the photos" - perhaps they never intended to publish them in the first place.
Yes, they do explicitly say exactly that. Term 3 in Jon Fine's email is "AMI agrees not to publish" and that directly follows term 2, which is Bezos backing off his assertion that AMI is politically motivated in their coverage. And term 6 means they get to keep the blackmail materials.
I don't usually put myself in debates on HN but I have always thought of you as a very rational guy so I'm surprised you make this comment-
Situation A: where none of this happened. Ami reserves the right to publish photos. Perfectly legal.
Situation B: Present
Offer- I wont publish them. But if you cheat- we go back to situation A.
Plain and simple. I am no lawyer bit everyone I've read today says that basically bezos has no case and his legal allowed him to publicize evidence and comment on 'an ongoing case'- commentary which can alter the 'case' pretty much means there is no case. The only thing that remains to be seen (or ignored) is when Ami will publish his photos because if they really want to play this game- that's what their next step would be.
>In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials.
That's very directly saying that they will publish the photos if Bezos doesn't do what they say.
> "6. In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials."
They don't really need to say more than that, do they?
> I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
It's going to be fascinating to see what he uncovers. David Pecker has been playing this extortion game for decades (frequently on behalf of his buddy Don Trump). Now Bezos has given a blank check to drain the swamp.
> To lead my investigation, I retained Gavin de Becker. I’ve known Mr. de Becker for twenty years, his expertise in this arena is excellent, and he’s one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know. I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.
If you ever find yourself with scandalous or incriminating material on someone remember this: Blackmail will always fail in the long run.
It's commonnly known in espionage tradecraft that it's an absolute last resort or totally off limits tool. The risk you take with coercive trade craft are insanely high.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why this is so low on HN? It has more votes and is more recent than anything except the "How I didn't make a billion dollar company" post, but is at rank 11.
HN penalizes post randomly sometimes. The last time I had one of my blogpost pretty high on the front page, it lasted an hour and then went directly to 5th-page. It gave me an impression that everything on the FP is heavily handpicked.
The title isn't something that I would have had any idea what it was about or why I should read it if I hadn't been linked here from a comment thread with a more informative title.
783 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 457 ms ] threadNormally, the Bezos affair story would be gossipy, but this alleges extortion, extraordinarily.
(Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)
Of course, we all know the only reason WashPo publishes articles critical of the administration is Bezos right? It mean, it's not like every other mainstream paper all over the world does it. And for no connection, no connection at all, the Whitehouse is suddenly talking about raising the rate Amazon is charged for postage. That couldn't possibly be vindictive retaliation by state power to get a newspaper to change, could it? Nah.
Edit: apparently he verified it by tweeting it. Still a worthwhile thing to remember to check in the future though, I imagine this kind of thing eventually being gamed, especially in such a drama-filled escapade as this.
Using his stake in the WaPo to boost a personal rebuttal would be a tremendous ethical lapse.
it does come across as quickly written and rather genuine
Very strange writing style "complexifier", "back to the story" multiple times.
In fact, why not bring up that he owns one of the most heavily trafficked websites on the planet. Why didn’t he publish this letter to Amazon.com front page? Equally valid question, no?
Jeff Bezos didn't spend his Thursday afternoon throwing up a static site in an S3 bucket.
He hit "publish" on Medium.
As others have mentioned, “thing of value” does not have to be monetary. For example, there are a number of cases where a person was found guilty of extorting another for sexual favors[0] or to exact a particular benefit (political or otherwise) from a victim.
——-
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion
The idea of AMI foregoing a story is not a good argument in this case because this would mean AMI profits by Bezos ignoring the request...
Failure to immediately understand why this is bad idea boggles my mind. Maybe this is how we ended up with Trump in the first place.
I am not sure the same thing can be true with his own newspaper.
Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a prominent person post the details of a personal extortion attempt out of defiance for all to see.
Weird and outrageous things I can think of that people have consented to:
- 'playing' with excrement (Gross! this is what the owner of Whole Foods thinks of basic hygiene)
- master slave play (Misogynist Bezos ordered this woman to ...)
- cuckolding (haha Bezos isn't enough of a man to satisfy his girlfriend himself)
Maybe the last one will 'only' cause you to lose the respect and thereby business deals of your peers.
--The President of the United States
Everything you mention pales in comparison to the quote above as long as it's between enthusiastically consenting adults.
Granted, I could just be projecting, but I don't think I'm alone here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44QgPty17Mc
This shows the whole Trump/AMI/Campaign org to essentially be a criminal mafia enterprise.
There are quite a few connections with organized crime, it turns out. This isn't just a random slur, but something that merits investigation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-trumps-mob-conne...
and of course there's this, too:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/d...
This is the very definition of a criminal enterprise. Breaking federal election laws, blackmailing those investigating your crimes. If the connection to the Trump campaign bothers you, that too is factual, given that AMI's agreement involved assistance they gave to the Trump campaign that was illegal, and the owner, David Pecker, is a close personal friend of the President.
There's pretty good circumstantial evidence from this, and the Cohen tapes, that using power and privilege to "deal with" personal or political enemies does not give pause to these people.
Thus, mafia-like behavior.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Beyond that, there is huge variation in how one phrases facts and how they relate to context. None of that is neutral or factual, even if the selected facts themselves are.
Even if you'd personally be unperturbed by a similar situation, the vast majority of humans would find it humiliating and invasive in the extreme.
Is a photo published in a disreputable magazine significantly worse than the information already out so far which already got people thinking about him sexting anyway combined with losing custody of ~70 billion dollars in the coming divorce? I'm not so sure. Their privacy was already thoroughly invaded before this latest development.
Yes, unequivocally. I suspect any PR person would agree. You can doubt information published by a disreputable source, but most people believe the images they see, even in this deep faked era.
Any photo you take with a connected device can be eventually obtained and published. I hope all the folks here are aware about that.
That Pecker and his ilk seem to think it is, is the reason they misjudged this situation so fatally.
But if it was "HOT NEW SCANDAL! You'll NEVER believe who's getting a divorce!!!! Cha-ching!" then I'm sure a lot more people would call it a scandal and be inclined to read about it. Clickbait-y titles have been a thing for a long time, and AMI's (as well as basically all other gossipy) magazines use them practically every issue to try and get you to buy it.
Sneaky edit : I'm sure one could not ignore his massive balls on any of the selfies AMI allegedly got their hands on ;)
And it's easy for us to say "Well I wouldn't be in that place to begin with", but as I much as I not be in this EXACT place, most of us have made mistakes that we deeply regret and fear getting out, or at least have the capability to. I don't have to assume I'd do this particular set of bad acts to be vulnerable. And once socially vulnerable, would money make it go away? No, not entirely, not enough. So how hard must it be for people who AREN'T disgustingly wealthy? Or even wealthy? Or even well-off?
Heck, with the quality of "deepfakes" or whatever now-a-days, all you need to do is find someone vulnerable to BEING vulnerable, and they don't even have to have done wrong. One marriage that has had no infidelity but is struggling, one person with a child/spouse who is suffering from serious depression/anxiety/suicidal/related issues. "hey, I have these pictures, and if you do X they don't have to see the light of day. You can deny them being real all you want...do you think that will really help?"
Or take the gross spectacle of releasing celebrity sex pics, or even just non-celebrity revenge pics. The only answer is for (1) we as a society to reject attempts to abuse this info and (2) to be less puritanical and judgmental about the victims here. To the Bezos example, one person can do wrong and we can oppose another using it to do wrong against them without condoning any of the original wrong.
Bezos has a hard time doing this, and it's far, far easier for him than for anyone else. I didn't care about his personal life before (note: Not the same as saying it doesn't matter) and I still don't, but even if I did I can find the blackmail efforts repugnant without letting adulterers off the hook.
...but that's hard too. Just not nearly as hard.
Agreed, probably Jeff Bezos has made those mistakes as well. However I fail to see any mistakes of his threatened to be revealed.
Cheating on his wife?
AMI way overplayed their hand here, and we may yet find that they had gone all-in.
And despite the letter, does anyone think he isn’t spending a big chunk of time on this?
Most Fortune 500 CEOs would be gone or forced into retirement.
That would mean he literally committed fraud. What's your source for that info?
> And despite the letter, does anyone think he isn’t spending a big chunk of time on this?
Why shouldn't he spend his time on whatever he wants?
Blue Origin yanked a super bowl ad after it was disclosed Sanchez was involved in its production team (presumably she was not free, and the ad certainly wasn’t.) It was then shifted to Washington Post at the last minute, with a slapdash ad. [0]
> ... time on whatever he wants?
He can, but that time has to come from somewhere. It’s hard to believe Amazon is getting his full attention. He can own the stock, but I certainly question whether Amazon has a business-focused leader right now.
[0]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/04/jeff-bezo...
Forget about the embarrassment, if he secretly capitulates to this, then the real blackmail material would be the capitulation, not the photos. Cause if the owner of Washington Post bowed down to blackmail, every article published in the article will be called into question.
And who gives a shit if a billionaire cheated on his wife or sent dick pics. I don't care. Did he murder someone? Did he not divorce his wife by parting with half his fortune?
Half of their fortune. It was communal property.
https://www.wired.com/story/mackenzie-bezos-amazon-lone-geni...
It's already well established fact that Jeff's/Amazon's costs in the early days were paid for with his parents' life savings.
"The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Brad Stone, the author of the 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. “They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”
"In a 2010 commencement speech he gave at Princeton, Jeff himself acknowledged the gamble his wife had taken. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,” he said. “MacKenzie … told me I should go for it.” (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)"
EDIT: @busterarm: We're not going to agree on what defines "earned", good chat.
Edit: I'm pretty sure Amazon shareholders won't agree with you about the definition of "earned" either. It's not just cash at stake here, it's voting power. Is that spousal support worth 8.5% control of the company? Up from 0%.
I'm not saying she isn't entitled to it, just that there's a difference between value through entitlement and value through work.
Honestly, I find that this stuff is as romanticized as the Old South.
So are you saying Amazon rose in value because Jeff had the undying support of his wife?
I would say the support helped Jeff until the company was self-sustaining and successful. Of course, without the initial support of his wife, Amazon would not have started in the first place, or perhaps, started a bit late or grow a bit slowly. Think of the counter argument. If Jeff's wife was vehemently against it, Jeff did not start any company, and then after 20 years she divorced him, she would still get a share of his money. Do lawyers then argue that since she did not support him in his endeavors, she ought to bear some of his opportunity cost?
Day to day operations were taken care of by Jeff. Extremely difficult decisions, ones that make or break a company were taken by Jeff. Hiring and firing decisions were taken by Jeff. Vision for the company originated with and sustained by Jeff.
I would not credit the wife with half of everything. Difficult to put a number to the situation. It's just sad.
I treat my wife like my cofounder with an equal share of equity. I wouldn't let my cofounder take anything less than half of the total value of the business if a liquidation/separation/liquidity event occurred, so why would I treat my spousal relationship differently considering the work a relationship requires? If you're concerned about your partner entitled to half as not being equitable, you might consider your partner selection before the division of equity.
This applies whether I'm worth a thousand dollars, or a billion dollars.
EDIT: Was I being judgemental? It was intended more as "Choose Wisely" from Indiana Jones. As you mention sytelus, most of success is luck, but you can make every effort to pick the right partner.
What I do care is the notion that the growth and success of Amazon is 50% due to the wife. That I disagree with.
Does your friend deserve $50B? I am not asking from legal point of view because that answer would be yes. I am asking this from philosophical perspective. Clearly if your friend didn’t lend you $10K, you wouldn’t have your $100B business. But that’s the seed stage only work your friend did. Does he deserve fruits of your 25 years of labor? Does your friend deserve that stack because he took risk without knowledge of how future would turn out?
This is one the deepest question that has huge consequences all the way in to the concept of money, capital, debt, rewards, collaboration and purpose itself.
Does Jeff deserve billions of dollars more than the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees who have collectively built the company? Are their fruits of their labor worth so much less than his, regardless of Jeff's hard business decisions and many more hours per week worked, simply because of how equity is constructed and distributed? Jeff has clearly spent over 20 years building his company, nights, weekends, missed time with family he'll never get back, but can you point to the decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Jeff alone?
Value, its attribution, and its equitable distribution is hard, and executed in an imperfect fashion.
Rewards in capitalism are to those who can convince others of value provided in exchange for an equity interest; capital is only a small part of that. Lots of equity is sweat equity!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker#Facebook
"She believes she is worth all her money, she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions. Anyone who disagrees is a hater. You're just jealous. "No, she's a fool!" Then how come she's so rich?
Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is [..] The standard criticism of her is that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her brother"-- but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing-- even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid in stock options. What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them.
[..] even her haters want the money to mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed reality testing and instead creates a new reality, it uses the truth in order to lie: of course I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value based on his labor. I'm rich because that's what I'm worth. "Isn't that specious reasoning?" Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock.*
And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense. To her haters Randi is a buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money; Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self worth. She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else. So she's disparaged in a specific way: she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother."
- https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/03/who_can_know_how_muc...
No, Jeff's wife was not in the room making the business decisions that were needed to be made to amass their fortune.
Let's say she watched the kids and maintained the house with no help. That's a mighty contribution, but there are other stay at home spouses that do that too who would be entitled to far less in a separation solely because of the money their partner has made.
So why does she get billions and the average stay at home divorcee gets thousands? Was her contribution to the family a million times more valuable than the average stay at home spouse?
No, Jeff made the money and she's entitled to half. They both knew that going in and know that now. She didn't earn billions through parenting that was so much better than anyone else or create that much more value than the average spouse, but she is entitled to half by law.
To put it another way, if they had signed a prenup and he had paid her $1000/hr 24/7 for 30 years, she would have earned $262 million. Or about 250 times less than the ~$65 billion she could get.
Instead, she walks away with having made about $290k per hour every hour every day for the 25 years they were married. That's a lot of support.
If his keeps his money in $100 bills, then you're right. $136 billion would weigh about 1,230 metric tons.
More likely, his cash consists of electronic entries in bank systems which weigh substantially less.
"Used for emphasis while not being literally true." [1]
[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/literally
I think AMI was looking forward to either damage WaPo or want JB to relinquish control of it. The game is WaPo, not JB.
I imagine this was the goal. They have some nude photos which are embarrassing and a chance for them to get in the door. If they could get Bezos and Washington Post to bow down on that, they'd have much more power and leverage going forward that could potentially destroy them both. Bezos called them out, and now all they have are these fairly meaningless Bezos nudes, which are not in the highest of demand.
I heard some people suggesting that it was a really poor move to blackmail Bezos in writing. However, if you believe the above, then it makes perfect sense. They wanted a very clean paper trail of their requests, Bezos and the Washington Post accepting the offer, and the future outcome of those actions. This would provide them with blackmail material much more valuable than the photos.
I wonder if this was the plan all along.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7f9D4KclJw
(David Letterman talks about an extortion attempt on him)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NaIwHWEE7k
That's the richest guy in the world saying "I don't give a XXXX what it costs, find out who did it."
It's also the moment in your life when, if you get the result that guys wants, he'll be glad to write you a cheque for $20,000,000 and will be happy to do so and he won't be interested in why the number is that high.
Also, never take notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy ;P
"Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge." -Machiavelli
One can quote mob movies all day but that doesn’t make them a smart criminal.
Go where the cops ain't.
People who idolize criminals show an entirely different character defect, one that is in opposition to being productive in any task criminal or otherwise.
I mean come on, you are literally taking on the richest person on earth and didn't even evaluate implications!? Just to belabor the point, he's not only the richest person right now, he's among the top 15[1] wealthiest persons of human civilization. And you are threatening him with, what, a bunch of nudish images and adult text messages!?
> and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
This had me laughing for a long time!!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...
Edit: Added wikipedia reference.
If it were a crime, it really wouldn’t be much of a threat because they’d be unlikely to follow through, would they?
Edit: there is one federal law where threatening embarrassment is enough, but that requires a demand for money or property, which this is explicitly not.
And because the downvotes are already rolling in: Note that I find this just as abhorrent as you do, and that sexploitation should absolutely be a crime. But the legal situation unfortunately is not at all as clear as the moral one. And the replies below are mostly embarrassing in that nobody even seems to have a clue on the difference between civil and criminal law. Carry on then...
> Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal embarrassing, disgraceful or damaging information about a person to the public, family, spouse or associates unless money is paid to purchase silence. It is a form of extortion. Because the information is usually substantially true, it is not revealing the information that is criminal, but demanding money to withhold it.
https://definitions.uslegal.com/b/blackmail/
Blackmail for Theft: Conspiracy to commit Theft.
Blackmail for Fraud: Conspiracy to commit Fraud.
It seems its considered blackmail but in the strictly legal sense I'm not sure. There's probably a law to cover that though, extortion?
Now if AMI wanted you or I to say those statements I’m not sure how valuable they’d be.
I would think that the demand for a public statement would qualify, however, I'm not a lawyer, and this case is unusual enough that I would not be confident in my personal interpretation of the law.
That's entirely untrue. The downvotes are rolling in because your assertion about blackmail is simply wrong. There are a myriad of local, state, and federal laws on blackmail that cover situations like this.
Blackmail can involve any threats to coerce using private materials, not just for financial objectives.
https://twitter.com/ryanhuber/status/1093665718464327680
even if that isn't the case, the amount of effort required for amazon to obtain a warrant from a magistrate judge or however they'd play it is negligible.
All they need to do is to tick one of the boxes in their ToS and kick them off their property. Heck, there's an entire sub-category of law colloquially known as "Amazon-law", where you hire folks who specialize in navigating the intricacies of Amazon's policies so your business doesn't get crushed:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
Edit: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ TL;DR - they can do whatever they want.
> You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for... content that violate the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others, our operations or reputation...
Character assassination of the chief head of AWS is damaging to the reputation of AWS in no uncertain terms.
We're at a point in time where the public, politicians and the tech community itself are becoming wary of tech monopolies. Currently Amazon has avoided the brunt of it (mostly due to being consumer friendly unlike Facebook) and the scrutiny it has had, has been focused on it's retail business.
Bezos booting someone off AWS would bring a ton of public scrutiny to an even more powerful monopoly, one that the public and politicians are by and large ignorant of. Plus it would (rightly) shake the tech community out of its complacency around cloud lock in and encourage us to explore solutions. (I realise there's already a lot of good work happening around this, but it's not an issue I've seen the wider industry talking about much)
Even if AWS has nothing to do with this it (unfairly) reflects extremely bad on them.
That would make being caught leaking the photos perjury. The stakes are so high that AMI might well not dare to do that.
Its easy to imagine that Bezos, whatever he is saying publicly, is also getting excellent legal consul privately and that two can play at the games that AMI is so infamous for.
The kind of people who care about "celebrity gossip" will have no idea who he is, and the people who do know who he is won't care. There is no market for these photos.
We all hate when the big guys use lawsuits to stifle the little guys, but getting AMI execs tied up in legal worries and costs seems, in this instance, to have popular appeal?
The only thing those photos would change is undeniably confirm that richest man on the planet has actual human male body and some love life, which pretty much everyone already suspected.
Some people will get a kick of it but it will eventually blend into the background same as fappening or a photo of a hole in the sock of president of world bank.
Yes, with conditions.
Bezos himself writes, in the article we're discussing:
I asked him to prioritise protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter. - emphasis mine.
And that:
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
Thus making it plain, simple, and obvious, that he recognises that having a net worth up around the US$137 billion[1] mark has it's perks.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Edit: inconsequential grammar improvement
Fair point, but obviously someone like Bezos should be able to make use of his resources in cases like these and I‘m sure nobody is arguing against that.
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
You’re right, most people are never going to face such an adversary personally.
But there are legions of other adversaries, at all sorts of levels, who are out to pray on almost anyone with a bit of money / fame.
What they care about is whether you have something that poses a danger to their (hidden) agendas.
If this is true, it may also mean that it is more likely that you have a lot of money (because there appears to be a statistical correlation between having lots of money and having stuff that's dangerous to the agendas of state-level global actors, likely because having lots of money means having lots of power and influence, which results in getting access to "stuff" you wouldn't have otherwise), but the former does not automatically result in the latter, and it also isn't a requirement for the latter.
Hence you can very well, through an infinite amount of random circumstances, come into possession of material deemed "dangerous" by the US and Saudi governments, while still being just a normal person living a normal life with a 5-digit net worth. Resulting in you being blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments. Most likely with quite some success.
Essentially we could develop a herd immunity to blackmail.
But if humanity as a whole...
As far as I’ve been able to determine, much to my chagrin, in many of the ways that matter most, humanity isn’t a coherent whole.
And I’ve got no idea what to do about it.
Then imagine if the material was about this other woman before he got his divorce.
Then imagine if the material contained actual borderline illegal stuff or something like photos of his nieces on a beach holiday.
He got lucky - many many others would capitulate.
"Imagine if instead of simply walking down the street you punched everybody you passed."
It helps to be backed by untold wealth but here is a guy who stands tall in the face of ghastly behaviour and in the face of deep personal embarrassment.
+1 Bezos.
Whatever the right adjective is, I'd definitely pick a negative one.
The way he cheated only makes an already dirty act so much nastier.
/s
Taken from the point of view of the divorce court, this is a LOT more ammo for his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her side. These photos are very soon to hit the greater web/papers and WILL be used against him in the proceedings.
You are correct, this decision by him to speak out is likely to cost him Billions.
It's something in the way people would look at you, talk about you, etc ...
If you combine that with the Streisand effect, there's no way a public figure can take this kind of hit and walk away unphased. It's very much human nature, and that's why Jeff's move is bold.
The only thing missing here is Bezos offering to up the ante with a newer dickpic.
In fact offering the full text of the extortion attempt shows true courage, and at the same time claims back all the power the items might have had.
It just makes me despise these dickheads even more and totally root (the Australian version) for Bezos - go get them!!
I'm super interested in what happens next.
AFAIK we are talking about a naked pic. If that was really so dangerous, people would never take naked selfies in the first place. I think it's hyperbole, even by american's puritan standards
I do of course realize that things can be very different for people in different positions, and of course sextortion of minors is a very different thing. But for someone reasonably secure both financially and emotionally, who cares? Only the sort of people I don't willingly spend time around anyway.
I don't know Bezos, but he's certainly OK financially, and this reaction seems to demonstrate emotional competence, too.
One thought did occur to me is that he is basically daring AMI to release the pictures. What if he knows the providence of these pictures, knows how they got into AMI hands, and knows that if AMI publish them he can sue them, Gawker (not Buzzfeed) style, into the ground?
Bezos is reasonably safe in airing this, because AMI will only dig itself a deeper hole if they post them. AMI botched the crud out of this operation by leaving a paper trail: They made accepting their offer completely unnecessary; I don't think there's any chance the pictures get posted now.
Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets?
You then commit to the path that you currently judge minimises your future contrition.
The very literal minded will take this at face value and miss the point of the construct, which is that having committed to a given path you have minimised your regret even if it turns out to be the wrong choice. Because you can look back and say "given the information I had, it looked like the right one". Which is another way of saying, "if I had my time again, I'd do it the same way", only now with rational evidence of this claim.
Thus turning confirmation bias into an affirmative and effective decision tool, by preforming the outcome around it.
If you follow this procedure, you may still turn out unhappy, but you won't blame yourself. It is especially recommended for people who may otherwise experience chronic decision paralysis comorbidly with crippling imposter syndrome.
One practical issue with this advice is that it can lead to the "death of a thousand cuts" where any single binary event can be weighed one way but over the course of thousands of iterations, the aggregate would be weighed the opposite.
Sure, in theory one would take into account all possible futures where this could happen but in practical terms that is a tough thing to do and there is seldom a good point to stop.
On the other hand I tend only to apply it for substantial life decisions. Quitting my job to launch a startup; getting married; moving to another country (x4); not eating the entire cheesecake; choosing Vim over Emacs etc.
<spoilers>
Where at the end once the mc has the new ability, she can see her painful future, and yet she accepts it because, well, what can you do about predestination? Had me thinking, if an individual could perceive time non-linearly, would they see their future folly, and yet perform the same mistakes, at peace with their actions?
</spoilers>
He has demonstrated a certain level of integrity, but that doesn't make him a Good Man.
And in the current world[+] there's so much exposure that such pictures will be drowned out by the sheer volume of stuff. Yes, we're still at a point where politicians can lose their jobs because of racialist photos or certain indiscretions, but at least the "indiscretions" have less and less power over non-politicians (actual bad deeds still do, but that's not an issue here).
And these pictures are all about consensual behavior that isn't extraordinary. There's not even a scandal.
[+] or in what I can imagine is a linear projection of today's world forward only a few years from now
For anyone else, going bankrupt in an attempt to fight blackmail would be a pyrrhic victory in the best-case scenario.
Morality aside, I don't have any sympathy for tabloids like these. What bothers me is I don't think much will change, even if Bezos wins here. As long as the public has voracious appetite for celebrity juicy stories, someone will find a way to feed it.
Can you clarify what makes one of these different from a racist photo?
Racialism -- pretending or willfully wanting to believe that there are actual meaningful racial distinctions differences -- you can see in the photos of lynchings, slave era laws in the slave states etc. I think most of the people in those photos knew they were wrong, just as I believe some of those old laws I've read were written by people who knew they were wrong. Likewise modern laws that happen to "coincidentally" exclude some sections of the population from voting.
I believe some racist comments and representations can be innocent (though in this day and age, quite few IMHO) and they can also be intended to send a message (e.g. neither Alexander Hamilton nor Aaron Burr were black; you could purposefully either neuter or hyper-extend the portrayal of Shylock to make a point).
The racialists have no excuse.
Sounds like precisely why he felt the buck had to stop somewhere.
http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/090...
>I didn’t know much about most of that a few weeks ago when intimate texts messages from me were published in the National Enquirer. I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer. As it turns out, there are now several independent investigations looking into this matter.
AMI showed up on Bezos's rader after they published his intimate text messages. Gawker showed up on Thiel's radar after they outed him. They both then went investigating to see if there was some illegal activity that these media companies were engaged in.
@ev is 3 out of 3 (and a podcast pivot).
https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA
> If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)
(emphasis added)
https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093654471157170177
https://twitter.com/renato_mariotti/status/10936583665834229...
If I had an affair with a celebrity, I can start a bidding war for my story between all the movies studios, television studios, and publishing houses. That's legal. If I invite the celebrity to bid, then I've committed a crime.
I've always found it hard to justify blackmail laws.
I think blackmail is obviously wrong as is sensationalism and appealing to base desires over informing people. i am not sure where laws should apply, but these appear to be important levers in the control of our society we should pay special attention to due to their ability to enable and empower the unscrupulous. If we dont have laws to govern these thing we must accept the responsibility of society to educate everyone to a high standard (as an independent thinker, more than a rule follower) to mitigate the severe risk in this area.
If you actually had a setup as you described, all of the news outlets would publish the facts of your story, without paying you anything, because facts aren’t protected by copyright. The only thing you could sell would be an exclusive interview.
When I said publishing house I meant book publishers like Penguin Random House. I don't know where news outlets come into it.
Whether the medium is a book or a newspaper or a website is legally immaterial. Thinking about the information as news is just useful because no one owns the facts, only their particular descriptions of them.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who sidestep trouble with a deal like that, and then go right out and burn it up like idiots. I just don't get it?
Or did it say they wouldn't commit any more crimes?
These photos were stolen.
We are all human. Nobody wins this 'moral crusade' that takes up so much airtime.
We should be much more focused on the existential threats that the entire biosphere is dealing with, not the 'dick pics' of the world's richest man. He's just another dude at his core it seems, happens to be founder of Amazon though.
Bezos can get fucked. He's worse than Thiel[0] or Andreessen.[1] Those two only committed a single capital sin each.
And I know it shouldn't mean a damn thing but I'm going to say it anyway, I've never worked with APIs or CLIs as infuriating as AWS's. They're horrible. The documentation is horrible. The service is over-priced and horrible, with unexpected caps and delays and fees that you only hit once you're starting to scale.
Fuck Amazon and fuck Bezos. He's like an Elon Musk without the class or philosophy.
[0] Thiel and his self-serving, false-but-seemingly-naive libertarianism and hypocritical support of Trump.
[1] Andreessen's support for the NSA's lies to congress about what they were doing. I don't support Snowden's actions—they were far too reckless—but I also don't support blatant lies to congress. We either have a democracy or we don't and we shouldn't be lied to. A simple "that is classified" is sufficient, and Andreessen calling Snowden a traitor because "we all know it was going on anyway" is the admission of a kleptocrat or oligarch of their privileged, beguiling position.
Edit:
Amazon is a plague. I invite the downvotes, Bezos bots or not. Nobody disagrees with what I've outlined because it's fundamentally true. Amazon is fucking trash.
> I think Omar, Stringer and Machiavelli would have gotten along on some level.
Bezos still a human being like me and like you, whether you love him or hate him. I didn't say he cured cancer but last I checked, he puts ONE BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR into Blue Origin to help our species keep evolving towards a spacefaring civilization. How many other people are doing that?
I am aware of the grey-area Amazon operates in but it's still better than the oligarchs before Big Tech. I'll give my money to Amazon before Wal-Mart, I know that. Amazon invests billions of dollars in retraining warehouse employees who are getting replaced by automation for high-demand jobs. Amazon didn't have to do that, but they made a decision to and I'm sure Bezos signed off on it.
If you disagree with Amazon and AWS that much, build something better.
Show me some real proof that Amazon is retraining warehouse employees with skills into high-demand jobs. It will be the first I'll hear of it.
As for building something better, doing nothing would suffice. They're a net-negative on the world. I'm not so negative on any other tech company. Most have redeemable qualities, but AZ doesn't. They're a brutally bad company and their founder is central to the problem. They're 10–100x worse than Facebook.
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-pledge-to...
That's a subjective opinion. Amazon started out as a book store and I love books, so I naturally stuck with them from the late 90's til now. It's an incredible story to go from next to dead to where they are today. Only bigger 'comeback' is probably Apple, another company you probably hate. Right?
Facebook is the next AOL or Yahoo, just a matter of time now. People are loyal until they aren't, then they'll leave in droves. The reverse 'early adopter' stage is already happening...
You see Blue Origin as "moving towards a spacefaring civilization", I see it as "rich person plays with money gotten by aggressively underpaying everyone involved in his enterprise"
It's like Bill Gates giving to charity. Sure, it's better for him to give than not to. But we can also just take the money and improve society no matter what the whims of a single person. Why do we give billionaires the choice to hoard away their money at all? What purpose does it serve?
For every Gates there's a hundred Elisions, who decide that the money should go towards buying Hawaii and mega yachts instead of curing malaria.
Fair points. I don't have the answers. I'm curious to find out like the rest of us though.
What are people expecting? The billionaires give up their money, redistribute it into the 'common good' and all our problems will go away? Yeah, I'm sorry but I think this situation is more complicated than that.
I happen to like Peter Thiel a lot and agree with most of his perspectives. I'm not sure if punishing an extremely forward-thinking organization is the way forward for our society.
I don't know. I'm hungry to find out though. What are your thoughts on this?
In other words, bad behavior that's bad for the consumer is highly correlated with monopolies, but not synonymous. Sometimes companies grow large exactly because they are good for the consumer and so consumers prefer them.
Related to that, I think a lot of the negative feelings toward Amazon come from a fear about the power that Amazon holds as such a huge company without substantial competition. And while they do have a lot of power, I've not seen abuses from them that would warrant such fear.
† Reports emerged today that there's apparently audio of MBS himself ruminating over having him murdered.
Nearly everyone who wants funding at this scale hits up the Saudis. Describing that AMI looked for funding with the Saudi royals doesn't strike me as a particularly significant reveal; Musk did it relatively recently, and he wasn't excoriated for it. How is news that AMI is doing it worthy of a push-all-the-chips-into-the-pot move like AMI pulled?
Now if Bezos' private investigation team is getting close to some kind of Kryptonite like Pecker personally authorized his staff to assist with encouraging Khashoggi to visit the Saudi's Turkish embassy as a favor to the royals to try to ingratiate himself and angle for a funding pitch, then I could understand Pecker's reaction. Even if Pecker and AMI didn't know the Saudi's intent, it would indeed be very awkward for AMI and the Saudis. The other direction this could be going is the Saudis are directing AMI via cut-outs to dissuade any deeper investigation into Khashoggi's death, and miscalculated Bezos' mettle.
I wonder if AMI overplayed the "Bezos cheated in his marriage!1!1" angle, too. If there is more or less a collective shoulder shrug that billionaire POTUS DJT cheated on Melania, I'm not clear what AMI thought the impact would be on Amazon's public opinion that its billionaire founder/leader is doing the same.
This will be interesting to follow.
Whether or not Pecker is a criminal mastermind is for the courts to say, but his response does him no favors in the public eye and in the press.
The Saudis claimed they had no involvement in it, although an Associate Press investigation revealed that it had circulated among Saudis weeks before publication [2]
This issue was distributed at supermarkets across the United States.
Whether there was an untoward arrangement behind it might be under investigation.
1.https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saud...
2. https://nypost.com/2018/04/24/the-strange-saga-of-a-pro-saud...
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/109371533307931853...
They never explicitly say that, do they? I'm not enough of a lawyer to know if what they did still counts as extortion/blackmail, but as far as I can see they simply describe the photos, and propose an agreement that would prevent them from publishing the photos. But they never say "Do this or we'll publish the photos" - perhaps they never intended to publish them in the first place.
Situation A: where none of this happened. Ami reserves the right to publish photos. Perfectly legal.
Situation B: Present Offer- I wont publish them. But if you cheat- we go back to situation A.
Plain and simple. I am no lawyer bit everyone I've read today says that basically bezos has no case and his legal allowed him to publicize evidence and comment on 'an ongoing case'- commentary which can alter the 'case' pretty much means there is no case. The only thing that remains to be seen (or ignored) is when Ami will publish his photos because if they really want to play this game- that's what their next step would be.
>In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials.
That's very directly saying that they will publish the photos if Bezos doesn't do what they say.
They don't really need to say more than that, do they?
It's going to be fascinating to see what he uncovers. David Pecker has been playing this extortion game for decades (frequently on behalf of his buddy Don Trump). Now Bezos has given a blank check to drain the swamp.
> To lead my investigation, I retained Gavin de Becker. I’ve known Mr. de Becker for twenty years, his expertise in this arena is excellent, and he’s one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know. I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.
It's commonnly known in espionage tradecraft that it's an absolute last resort or totally off limits tool. The risk you take with coercive trade craft are insanely high.
As proven here.
https://imgur.com/a/bifDABu