People try and get out of deals all the time. It's a normal part of business.

He waived his ability to do due diligence which is part of the normal business process that allows for backing out of a deal, because he was so confident in buying Twitter. Then he almost immediately tried backing out by claiming that things that would have been found out during the due diligence phase were a surprise to him(bots).

It was forced because he left himself open to the deal being forced which was the idiotic mistake

I think we can take it that you haven’t been part of many businesses that actually had to compete and operate with other businesses with equal leverage. The way a business negotiates when it’s getting bought out due to failing investor goals is a lot different than when the two opposing parties have equivalent leverage

He did not claim that bots were a surprise -- in fact, getting rid of bots was the premise of his offer in the first place. His issue with the bots was that he thought there was evidence that there were far more bots than claimed and Twitter was dodging his requests for info. There are some plausible arguments that even outside due diligence that bot problem would be meaningful, like that it's a materially adverse change.

But that's all beside the point. These kind of antics happen all the time in the business world. The buyer threatens to back out, the seller takes them to court, they settle. LVMH & Tiffany comes to mind as a very recent example: it wasn't a due diligence argument there, either.

If I may white knight for one of the most powerful men in history for a moment: It's entirely possible that Bezos and his wife just drifted apart over the decades and separated amicably. And half of that fortune was always Mackenzie's from the start, that's how marriage works in the USA.

They announced the divorce one day prior to his having an affair hitting the news cycle.

I mean we don't know anything about the internals of their relationship, and "hitting the news cycle is" I guess just some arbitrary hassle from their point of view. We could suppose that they grew distant, they basically separated, he started a new relationship/affair, and then they formalized the divorce.

Regardless, their money was realistically getting split anyway, so the decision of when to start the affair probably didn't cost him anything.

> Jeff Bezos's decisions about where to stick his weiner cost him tens of billions of dollars.

People are allowed to want to divorce without it being referred to as "where he sticks his weiner". I think what grosses me out is that revenge porn was laid thickly on top of this that people just actively ignored.

Not a fan of Bezos by any means imaginable, but I think that the revenge porn thing that happened to him was the work of a state actor, more exactly of Saudi Arabia.

Not saying that that makes it better, quite the contrary, just that most probably it wasn’t something personal, just a raison d’etat thing.

> People are allowed to want to divorce without it being referred to as "where he sticks his weiner".

No they're not. Getting a divorce doesn't give you the right to control how other people talk about your divorce.

> I think what grosses me out is that revenge porn was laid thickly on top of this that people just actively ignored.

People care about revenge porn because it hurts vulnerable people (i.e. the vast majority of us.) People don't give a shit about revenge porn about people who aren't vulnerable in any way.

I'm not a fan of Bezos or his companies but these are objectively shitty takes.

> Getting a divorce doesn't give you the right to control how other people talk about your divorce.

Obviously the discussion here is in terms of civility and respecting people's privacy, not 'control'.

> … "civility and respecting people's privacy" …

God how I wish we still lived in that world…