by Brad Stone
Howard tried to avoid making such an explicit threat but approached the abyss anyway by continuing to reserve the paper’s rights to publish the materials. “This is not in any way to be construed as some form of blackmail or anything like that!” he told the veteran investigator at one point. “It’s in both parties’ interest to come to terms, given the specter of legal claims that are flying around.”
Howard and de Becker appeared to make progress. On February 6, AMI’s new deputy general counsel Jon Fine—the hasty replacement for Cameron Stracher and a relative stranger to the Machiavellian hellscape of tabloid lawyering—sent the proposed terms of an agreement via email to Marty Singer. AMI would agree not to publish or share any of the unpublished photos or texts if Bezos and his reps join the company in publicly rejecting the notion that the Enquirer’s “reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.”
The email was easily viewed as extortive. On February 7, Bezos told his advisors that he knew exactly what he was going to do. He wrote a thousand-word-plus essay titled “No thank you, Mr. Pecker,” and handed it off to Jay Carney at Amazon, whose brow furrowed in surprise as he read it for the first time while on a Chime video conference with colleagues. Then he had it uploaded to the publishing site Medium.
In the post, Bezos included the entirety of the emails from Jon Fine and Dylan Howard and wrote:
Something unusual happened to me yesterday. Actually, for me it wasn’t just unusual—it was a first. I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I’m glad they thought that, because it emboldened them to put it all in writing.
Bezos then recounted AMI’s legal entanglements with the Trump administration and its failed attempts to win an investment from the government of Saudi Arabia—another government hostile to the Washington Post’s reporting. His ownership of the paper, Bezos wrote, “is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.” He also added that he didn’t regret owning the paper, “a critical institution with a critical mission” and “something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long…”
This noble sentiment, of course, had little to do with his yearlong open conduct of an extramarital relationship, the calculated perfidy of his girlfriend’s brother, or the desperate attempts of AMI to escape a cloud of political suspicion. But like the “Reynolds Pamphlet,” which Alexander Hamilton penned in the 1790s, accusing his opponents of extortion when he was confronted with charges of an adulterous affair, the Medium post was a public relations master stroke. Bezos cast himself as a sympathetic defender of the press and an opponent of “AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism.”
Whether or not Bezos knew or even suspected that the Enquirer’s threat to publish an explicit photograph was hollow is unclear. To interested readers blissfully unaware of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, Bezos was taking a brave stand against the devious tactics of Donald Trump’s tabloid allies while vulnerably offering his own embarrassing photographs as collateral. “Bezos Exposes Pecker,” declared the New York Post memorably, as public sympathies in the imbroglio immediately shifted to his side.
As the Medium post was being published on the afternoon of February 7, Gavin de Becker stalled Dylan Howard, who was pressing him via text messages for an update on the Bezos camp’s response to AMI’s offer. Finally, the famed security consultant delivered the coup de grâce, texting the tabloid editor: “As you can likely see, I ran into resistance to your proposal.”
* * *
Dylan Howard was also getting dunked on closer to home. Shifting into damage control mode and trying to preserve his company’s precarious legal and financial position, David Pecker blamed his chief content officer for the entire debacle. He removed Howard from his position and gave him the largely ceremonial role of senior vice president of corporate development, where he had few editorial responsibilities. Howard left AMI when his contract expired a year later.
“I paid the ultimate sacrifice for a story that was 100 percent true,” Howard said when I contacted him for his recollections of the saga, before noting that the ongoing litigation prevented him from addressing it further. “I was tarred with the unfounded allegation that I did it with political motivations.”
In addition to sinking Howard’s career at AMI, Bezos’s essay took the already muddled question of how the paper obtained his private text messages and photographs and confused it further. Bezos artfully suggested in his post that AMI’s apoplexy over the investigation into the story’s origins was “still to be better understood” and that “the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.”
Gavin de Becker followed up those assertions in March by writing an article for the Daily Beast. He pointed to AMI’s frantic attempts to defend itself from the charge of engaging in a political conspiracy and suggested that there must be another layer of hidden truth in the whole ordeal. “Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private information,” he wrote. “As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.”
Pecker and his colleagues had first faced the allegation that they were operating on behalf of Donald Trump; now they confronted the insinuation that they were in league with the Saudis. With Howard sidelined and on vacation in Mexico, the company decided that it need not honor its confidentiality promise to Michael Sanchez. “The fact of the matter is, it was Michael Sanchez who tipped the National Enquirer off to the affair on September 10, 2018, and over the course of four months provided all of the materials for our investigation,” the company said in a statement. “His continued efforts to discuss and falsely represent our reporting, and his role in it, has waived any source confidentiality.”
But AMI’s disclosures carried little weight, particularly since its executives had lied so flagrantly about the “catch and kill” allegations related to Trump. Hints of an international conspiracy endured—in large part because of the improbable truth in the idea that the government of Saudi Arabia was out to get Jeff Bezos.
Like other U.S. business leaders, Bezos had cultivated a personal relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, back in early 2018, when the young crown prince of Saudi Arabia appeared committed to liberalizing the religiously conservative country and weaning it off its dependence on oil revenues. Bezos met MBS on the prince’s spring tour of the U.S. that year, and they exchanged WhatsApp numbers. Over the next few months, they kept in touch over WhatsApp and discussed Amazon’s plans to spend as much as $2 billion putting AWS data centers in the country. That May, the crown prince sent Bezos an encrypted video file that appeared to contain a promotional video, touting the country’s low broadband prices. Bezos was befuddled by the message, which was in Arabic. “Impressive numbers and video,” he eventually replied.
A few months later, on October 2, Bezos was in Washington, D.C., accepting the Samuel J. Heyman Spirit of Service Award and sitting with Washington Post colleagues. In the middle of the event, publisher Fred Ryan leaned over and whispered that he had news to share, then wrote it down on a piece of paper: earlier that day, Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing Post columnist who had written columns criticizing MBS’s vicious turn to authoritarianism, had walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to obtain a marriage license and hadn’t come out. Bezos read the note and whispered back, “Let me know what I can do to help.”
Over the next few weeks, the Post doggedly investigated Khashoggi’s grisly murder while its opinion writers condemned the Saudi government and called for U.S. companies to sever ties with Saudi business interests. Like other business leaders, Bezos canceled plans to at
tend bin Salman’s Future Investment Initiative, the annual event known as “Davos in the Desert.” But curiously, MBS continued to text Bezos, including sending a WhatsApp message that appeared to allude to Bezos’s marital problems, which were still secret in the fall of 2018. “Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License agreement,” MBS wrote, alongside an image of a brunette who bore a vague resemblance to Lauren Sanchez. “In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree.”
Meanwhile, an ad hoc Twitter army organized by MBS’s regime hit at Bezos online, posting graphics and videos that labeled him a racist enemy of Saudi Arabia and called for a boycott of Amazon and its subsidiary, Souq.com.
@aadelljaber
We as Saudis will never accept to be attacked by The Washington Post in the morning, only to buy products from Amazon and Souq.com by night! Strange that all three companies are owned by the same Jew who attacks us by day and sells us products by night!
12:20 PM · Nov 4, 2018
In early 2019, as his battle with the Enquirer burst into the open, Bezos (who is not Jewish) would have additional reasons to believe his smartphone was compromised. On February 16, after Bezos had aired his suspicions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the entire affair, MBS again texted Bezos, writing a message in English replete with typos: “Jeff all what you hear or told to it’s not true and it’s matter of time tell you know the truth. There is nothing against you or amazon from me or Saudi Arabia.”
De Becker then commissioned an examination of Bezos’s iPhone X. The eventual report by Anthony Ferrante, a longtime colleague of de Becker’s and the former director for cyber incident response for the U.S. National Security Council, concluded that the promotional video about broadband prices that MBS had sent Bezos the previous year likely contained a copy of Pegasus, a piece of nearly invisible malware created by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once the program was activated, Ferrante found, the volume of data leaving Bezos’s smartphone increased by about 3,000 percent.
Some prominent cybersecurity experts questioned Ferrante’s conclusions amid an absence of more concrete forensic evidence. The massive “exfiltration of data” from the phone that Ferrante documented also happened to coincide with Bezos’s exchange of text messages and personal videos with Lauren Sanchez. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reported that Saudi officials close to the crown prince were aware of a plan to attack Bezos’s phone. In 2020, a report produced by United Nations human rights investigators Agnes Callamard and David Kaye confirmed with “medium to high confidence” that the Saudis had hacked the phones of Bezos and other political and press figures, part of a broad attempt to try to control media coverage of its government.
Had MBS’s regime learned of Bezos’s relationship with Lauren Sanchez and tipped off the National Enquirer or even supplemented the information it received from Michael Sanchez? That possibility might make certain logical sense if you squinted hard enough. David Pecker had once unsuccessfully courted Saudi investors to finance AMI’s purchase of Time. To boost their prospects, AMI executives had even produced a sycophantic ninety-seven-page glossy magazine, called The New Kingdom, on the eve of the crown prince’s U.S. tour. But at least from my vantage point, at this particular moment in time, there is not any conclusive evidence to support the hypothesis that the Saudis alerted the tabloid paper to Bezos’s affair—only a fog of overlapping events, weak ties between disparate figures, and more strange coincidences.
For Bezos and his advisors though, who were still trying to positively spin the embarrassing events surrounding his divorce, such a cloud of uncertainty was at the very least distracting from the more unsavory and complicated truth.
* * *
As the entire mêlée quieted over the course of 2019, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez started appearing together in public. In July, they attended the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, mingling with the likes of Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. A few days later, they watched the Wimbledon men’s finals from the Royal Box, three rows behind Prince William and Kate Middleton. In August, they gamboled in the western Mediterranean Sea on the super yacht of mogul David Geffen. There were also trips to Solomeo, Italy, for a summit organized by luxury designer Brunello Cucinelli and to Venice, aboard the mega yacht of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg. During these trips, Bezos was repeatedly photographed wearing a pair of stylish octopus-print multicolor swim trunks, inadvertently igniting a fashion trend.
For two decades, Bezos had remained singularly focused on Amazon and his family, with Blue Origin and space travel capturing his only scraps of time left. But his extraordinary wealth, insatiable curiosity about interesting people, and thirst for new experiences, as well as his relationship with Lauren Sanchez, had clearly changed him. It turned out that he relished the trappings of his extraordinary success. To those who had spent an inordinate amount of time observing him, he looked vibrant and happy.
His divorce from MacKenzie was finalized in July 2019. She received 19.7 million shares of Amazon stock, worth about $38 billion. As part of the settlement, he retained voting rights over her stock, though not after she sold it or gave it away—one of the reasons, investors had speculated, that Amazon might have explored the creation of a second class of stock the year before.
She also retained their Seattle and L.A. homes and signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give away more than half her wealth. Over the course of 2020, she would donate almost $6 billion to organizations like food banks, community groups, and historically Black colleges, while posting a personal essay about her motivations—a departure from her reticent approach to promoting Bystander Revolution years before. She also changed her name to MacKenzie Scott—the middle name she had grown up with.
Michael Sanchez, meanwhile, moved to San Francisco with his husband. His entire family stopped speaking to him, save for his mother, Eleanor. In two separate defamation lawsuits in L.A. district court, he sued AMI, and Bezos and Gavin de Becker, and lost nearly every subsequent legal decision as the facts dribbled out. In early 2021, Bezos asked the court to compel Sanchez to pay $1.7 million in attorney fees, though the judge later lowered that amount to $218,400. And in the Southern District of New York, federal prosecutors investigated Bezos’s allegation, leveled in his Medium essay, that he was extorted by AMI after it published the National Enquirer article. The evidence must have been lacking though, because prosecutors appeared to quietly drop the matter without ever bringing a case.
For his part, Bezos quickly moved on. In October, he turned up unexpectedly outside the former Saudi consulate in Istanbul to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Gavin de Becker handled the intricate security arrangements. Bezos sat next to Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancée, and embraced her during the ceremony. “Right here where you are, you faced that street for hours, pacing and waiting, and he never came out. It is unimaginable,” he said. “And you need to know that you are in our hearts. We are here.”
The trip into potentially dangerous territory was another sign to employees of the Washington Post that their owner would stand up for their journalism, whatever the personal cost. It was also an arrow aimed directly at Bezos’s enemy, MBS.
As such dramatic gestures replaced the scandal in the collective memory, Bezos’s colleagues at Amazon could only watch and wonder: Did their CEO still belong to them, or to some alternate dimension of wealth, glamour, and international intrigue? He seemed to show up just as frequently in the press as in the office, buying historic works of art, and snapping up David Geffen’s nine-acre Beverly Hills estate for $165 million, a California real estate record. And there he was talking climate change with Emmanuel Macron in February 2020, with Lauren Sanchez by his side, and cavorting with her and other celebrities at the Super Bowl in Miami—even taking a turn in the DJ booth of a popular night club. What did the future hold for their founder?
One clue to that question could be found in the shipyards of the
Dutch custom yacht builder Oceanco. There, outside Rotterdam, a new creation was secretly taking shape: a 127-meter long, three-mast schooner about which practically nothing was known, even in the whispering confines of the luxury yacht industry—except that upon completion, it would be one of the finest sailing yachts in existence. Oceanco was also building for the same high-end clients an accompanying support yacht, which had been expressly commissioned and designed to include—you guessed it—a helipad.
Despite everything that had happened, Bezos’s armor of invincibility was only slightly dented. And now the greatest challenges to Amazon in its twenty-five-year history loomed: an opening salvo from its foes in the U.S. and European Union, who sought to curb the company’s formidable market power, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, which was about to bring the entire global economy to the brink of whimpering collapse.
CHAPTER 14 Reckoning
In the year after the Bezos-Sanchez tabloid melee, Amazon continued its dazzling ascent. With its market value drifting ever closer to the $1 trillion troposphere, the company announced that it would upgrade its shipping guarantee for U.S. members from two days to one, further strengthening the case for shopping online. Following the finalization of his divorce from MacKenzie in July 2019, Bezos’s personal net worth had dropped from $170 billion to $110 billion. Yet such was the buoyancy of Amazon’s stock price that he retained the title of richest person alive and recovered all of that surrendered ground within twelve months. His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.