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?
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 think AMI was looking forward to either damage WaPo or want JB to relinquish control of it. The game is WaPo, not JB.
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]
I wonder if this was the plan all along.
Half of their fortune. It was communal property.
https://www.wired.com/story/mackenzie-bezos-amazon-lone-geni...
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.
"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...
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!
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.
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.
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...
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=f7f9D4KclJw
(David Letterman talks about an extortion attempt on him)
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.
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.
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.