Amazon Part 6: The Billionaire and the Tabloid

up after twenty five years. Bezos kicked all of this off by sending a tweet, the couple releasing a joint statement Wednesday, reading, in part, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends. If we had known we would separate after twenty five years, we would do it again. This was shocking news to their colleagues, acquaintances, even casual friends. Most people had no reason to believe

the relationship was strained. Of course, couples get divorced all the time. It's what happened next to change the course of the Amazon story. Later that day, a usepaper tabloid reported that Bezos was seeing another woman. What happens when one of the richest men in the world decides to divorce his wife and then starts dating the wife of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. So wait,

Jeff Bezos had a girlfriend. Bezos had presented a picture of an amicable separation in his tweet, but within just a few hours reports in the news media, we're complicating his tidy narratives. Not long after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife Mackenzie announced they were divorcing after twenty five years of marriage, reports surface that Bezos had been dating TV personality Laurence Sanchez. She's now separated from her

husband Patrick Whitesell. He's the co CEO of the Hollywood agency w M E and reportedly introduced Bezos to his wife. All three were photographed together at an Amazon party. Soon it became clear that the infamous supermarket tabloid, The National Inquirer was ready to publish the entire story it had the couple's private romantic text messages. The media had a field day on the real A daytime talk show host Lonnie Love lampoon the text messages with a dramatic reading,

you know what I want. I want to get a little drunk with you tonight. Not falling down, no, just a little drunk. I want to talk to you and plan with you. Listen and laugh. I basically want to be with you when I want to fall asleep with you and wake up tomorrow, read the paper with you, and have coffee with you. Yes, me to say and sing. And of course even the President of the United States joined the pylon. Well, I wish your luck. I wish

your luck. It's gonna be a beauty. Here was the world's then wealthiest man, a business icon, having an adulterous relationship, and even more shocking getting busted by a sleazy tabloid inside Amazon employees and executives where flabbergasted. Here's former VP Craig Berman. It was shocking when it came up because it was completely unexpected, and that was a turn that I'm not even sure Hollywood could come up with that kind of plot twist. You're listening to Foundering, I'm your host,

brad Stone. The leaked story about Bezos's affair posts several mysteries. What happened to the bezos Is marriage, How did Bezos get involved with Laurence Sanchez, a former TV anchor, But most pressing of all, how did the National Enquirer get Jeff Bezos's personal text messages as well as intimate photographs, including, as they claimed at the time, a Dick pick I spent several months unraveling these questions and also looking into a huge allegation posed by Bezos himself that there may

have been a global conspiracy to embarrass him. The resulting saga touched on the Washington Post, journalistic freedom, Donald Trump, the crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and the murder of dissident journalist Jamaica Shoji. Unbelievably, Bezos managed to come out ahead.

In a stroke of pr genius, he turned the tables on his tabloid adversaries, But in the end, the entire episode would have enormous repercussions for Bezos and for Amazon, a company nearing a one trillion dollar market value at the very height of its control over the Internet and the US economy. It's the tech mogul versus the tabloid.

We'll tell you that story after the break. All tech companies need a powerful founding story, and the story of Jeff and Mackenzie driving to Seattle after leaving New York City in has been part of Amazon's mythology from day one. In April eighteen, Axel Springer CEO Matthias Stuffner asked Jeff Bezos about it in an on stage interview. The launch of Amazon was really something that you did together. Could

you describe a little bit what Mackenzie's role was. First of all, Mackenzie, you know, she had married the stable guy working on Wall Street, and a year after we got married, I went to her and said, I want to quit my job, move across the country and start this uh internet bookstore. And Mackenzie, of course, like she said, great, let's go, because she wanted to support it, and she knew that I had always had this passion for invention

and starting a company. It's a story that Bezos had been telling for more than twenty years example that Mackenzie's acceptance of this dot com dream was key to the company's founding. Here he is talking to Henry Blodget of Business Insider. You turned fifty recently. Any change outlook on life? Uh? No, not really, you know, I Uh, I'm still dancing into the office. I love my life. I have four kids. My wife claims to still like me. I don't question

her aggressively on that. Um, I do the dishes every night, and I can see that actually makes her like me. It's a very odd thing. It's I think that too. I'm pretty convinced it's like the sexiest thing I do. His wife humanized him. She made him seem like more than a businessman whose creation was up ending retail and devastating small merchants. In the early days of Amazon, Mackenzie was in a girl to the business of the company.

She was Amazon's first accountant. As the company added employee, she was able to move away from the day to day business of Amazon and pursue her own interests. At Princeton, she had studied to be a writer. She published two novels called The Testing of Luther Albright and Traps, and one of her rare public appearances, Mackenzie Bezos described her then husband as one of her best readers. Here she

is in conversation with Charlie Rose. He's such a good reader, and I wanted to get his reaction to the actual story so that he was so that he could be surprised in the right places. You know, I still have the copy he read. It's great because he very generously went through and wrote all the spots that made him laugh out loud, and all the spots that made him try.

Mackenzie illuminated another side of Bezos. It was quite endearing that he was the kind of husband so supportive of her that he would read and mark up her manuscripts line by line. Here was somebody routinely accused of killing books actively making one better. Inside Amazon, employees viewed Bezos as a family man. Craig Berman, a former communications executive, worked directly with Bezos for over a decade. In my experience in working closely with him, uh family was everything

to Jeff. He was extremely and still is extremely close to his family. That the reverence he has for his parents, it's as high as it gets, and that flowed into his own personal family. Mackenzie was no longer active in Amazon after the earliest days, but critic says her opinion was still highly valued. She came in to help Bezos prepare for the most high stakes presentations, including the unveiling

of the Kindle. So Kendall came out is very, very newsworthy, and Jeff was front and center unveiling these products on stage, and there was an extraordinary amount of preparation. Mackenzie did come in and she would sit in the audience and watch Jeff go through multiple rehearsals, and she would provide feedback. In these moments, Craig and all the Amazon employees could see the deep respect that Bezos had for his wife. It came across as a marriage of equals. I think

he absolutely trusted her judgment and valued her perspective. And I think Jeff appreciated having a really smart person who could be pretty objective. You know, we would prepare for it. It's like this is a rehearsal that Mackenzie's coming to. Now. Who can really say what happens inside the private confines of a marriage, but clearly over the years Bezos and Mackenzie grew apart. She was a bookish writer who rarely made public appearances, and as far as I could tell,

she's virtually unknown. And see how all social circles. Bezos was drawn to public events, the trappings of wealth, and the lure of adventures like scuba diving and space travel. As we discussed in an earlier episode, he also gravitated to Hollywood and the bright lights of celebrity. On December three, he hosted a star studied Hollywood party at his home in Beverly Hills, Mackenzie was nowhere to be found, and one of the guests was a woman named Laurence Sanchez.

She had her own helicopter video production company, and she was a veteran broadcaster, the former host of the tabloid TV show Extra and the morning program Good Day l A. Here she is doing a TV segment on a private jet company. Not that it's an option for everyone, but Flight Options is a company that offers private jets. You don't even understand how exciting this is for me. This is the most amazing plane. And look, I want to take you inside this beauty. It is unbelievable. Lauren was

at the party with her then husband Patrick Whitesell. He's a major Hollywood agent. At the party, Beazos was photographed with Lauren and Patrick. I'm not entirely sure if that's the first time they met, but it's clear that after the party, Beazos and Laurence started seeing more of each other, and by the beginning of laurence Helicopter Company was filming documentary videos for bezos is private space company Blue Origin.

Now is the time to open the promise of space to all and lay the way for generations to come. We are a blue origin, and this is where it begins. Sometime that year, it appears they started dating. Strangely, Bazos carried on the relationship out in the open, even though he was still married. His total disregard for public attention was baffling. Either he didn't anticipate the coming avalanche of

negative publicity or he didn't care. They were photographed at a hotel in Miami and at fancy restaurants in Venice Beach and Santa Monica. That December, Bezos had another celebrity filled party for Amazon Studios at his Hollywood home. Once again, Mackenzie wasn't there. This time, Lauren was by his side. So it was probably inevitable that someone would reveal their affair, and that Bezos would try to get ahead of the

story by tweeting news of his divorce. Here's Craig. I was personally stunned, like jaw dropping to the floor, stunned. My colleagues were just as stunned. I think that was the universal reaction. It was so unexpected coming from this person who really, I mean, you talk about a reverence within an organization, Those those types of things just didn't happen, And so forward to happen at that level that the

surprise factor was it was off the chart. Crig says that the most unsettling thing was that Bezos preached good decisions and sound judgment within the company. It was like Bezos had violated his own code. His employees felt let down. This is a person and a company that put such a premium on having good judgment, and here was an incident where it looked like this person maybe wasn't displaying a level of judgment that that people expected of him,

and I think it was really jarring. Although Bezos got to announce his impending divorce himself, he couldn't contain the mail stroke them. The affair was revealed, the intimate text messages were leaked, and then things got even weirder. A few weeks later, on February seven, Bezos posted a remarkable essay to medium saying that he was being blackmailed. I asked my colleague to read a selection of it. 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, rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail. I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threatened. This was entirely unprecedented,

and there's a lot to unpack in here. In his essay, Beazo said he had hired private investigators to learn how the National Enquirer had gotten a text messages. The Inquirer seemed desperate to shut it down, and Bezos compet and paste and entire emails from the inquirers editor in chief. In the emails, the editor seemed to threaten to publish the intimate photographs that Bezos had exchanged with his girlfriend, including something the editor called a below the belt selfie.

In his essay, Bezos poses the question why was the National Enquirer so desperate to stop his investigators from sniffing around? This is where Bezos leaves the realm of established facts. He starts to construct a hypothetical case. He suggested the real culprits of his leaked photos might have been enemies of the Washington Post. Remember Bezos owns the Post, and the Post had a long list of enemies. In two thousand nineteen, they had aggressively covered the Trump presidency. That's

one enemy. Also, a few months before, a columnist for the Post named Jamalika Shoji was brutally murdered by Saudi agents, and the Post comprehensively reported on the atrocity. That made the Post a new enemy, the government of Saudi Arabia, whose Crown Prince allegedly ordered the killing. By the way, the Crown Prince denies this. Bezos just sort of put

these things out there. He never says it explicitly, but he leaves readers to connect the dots that maybe his intimate text messages were leaked because of some connection between the National Enquirer, Donald Trump, the Saudi government and their common enemy, the Washington Post. Here's an excerpt of what he wrote. My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It's unavoidable that certain powerful people who experienced Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am

their enemy. For reasons still to be better understood. The Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve. The essay melted the Internet. In media and tech circles, it was all anyone could talk about at the time. I'm writing a book about Amazon and Bezos, and I have the uncomfortable revelation that the story is moving in a completely unexpected and tawdry direction. To write a book about this iconic tech leader, I'm going to have to write

about a sex life. And I have to examine whether Bezos was the victim of a global conspiracy or is reel adversaries, tabloid journalists or the enemies of the Washington Post and a free press will unravel that mystery next. Okay, so the National Enquirer published an eleven page spread about Bezo his affair with Laurence Sanchez, and Bezos is now waging an all out war with the tabloid trying to understand how they got his text messages. He hired a

very powerful private investigator named Gavin de Becker. This guy is kind of a legend in the security field. Here's Gavin describing his credentials in an editorial about his work for Bezos. I asked my colleague to read what he wrote. For forty years, I've advised at risk public figures and government agencies on high stakes security matters. My career has included working with the CIA, FBI at the Reagan White House,

counseling foreign leaders, and advising on controversial murder cases. I've seen a lot, and yet I've recently seen things that have surprised even me. Almost immediately, Gavin suspicions fell on one of Laurence Sanchez's closest confidence, her older brother, Michael. Michael was a Hollywood talent manager who had helped Lauren with her career over the years. He later spoke to

Fox News about his relationship with his sister. I've been managing Laurence since the day she came home from the hospital, and through the highest of highs and lowest of low's, I've always been there to do whatever she needs and to protect her whenever she needs protection. To me, Michael sounds a bit defensive here. He's trumpeting his professional relationship with his sister, all claiming that she needs his protection

as if he's the guardian. I'm an accomplished fifty year old woman, and as we'll come to find out, Michael Sanchez was deeply involved in his sister's life. He went out for dinner several times with Bezos and Lauren while they dated, and he even attended another star studied party at bezos Is home. He described his first impressions of Jeff Bezos to Fox News well, to be perfectly honest, I didn't want to like him because it would have

made all of our lives much simpler. But when I met him, he was charming, brilliant, loved flying and everyone in our family and his pilots, so we had a lot to talk about. And most importantly, he was he was deeply in love with Lauren. Michael is one of the strangest people I've ever interviewed for a business story. He's charismatic and charming, full of swaggering confidence and gossip, but he's also full of contradictions. He's an avid Trump supporter,

and he's gay. He styles himself as a public relations guru, but imagines he has complete control over the media, which of course is impossible. As soon as his name surfaced as a leaker in the Bezos affair, Michael Sanchez said that any hint of his involvement was crazy. One soulce close to Jeff Bezos. His private investigators tells CBS News they've conducted multiple interviews with Michael Sanchez, the brother of

Bezos his own girlfriend. They say Sanchez, a Trump support, discussed the matter with What just Stone and caught a page two of Mr Trump stulches defenders. Contacted by CBS News, a person close to Michael Sanchez dismissed allegations of his involvement as quote sloppy leaks and crazy conservative conspiracy theories. Gavin de Beecker confirmed to the Daily Beast that his firm did speak to Michael Sanchez, and in their conversations

several things struck them as highly unusual. Gavin's firm says Michael shared outlandish theories about how the Inquirer might have learned about Bazos's affair with his sister. He suggested that the Deep State or American spies might have hacked into Bezos's phone. He also bragged about his ties to right wing Trump world types, and he suggested that he knew the editor of The National Enquirer and kept bragging about

how he could manipulate the paper's coverage. By the end of these phone calls, the private investigator was convinced that Bezos's girlfriend's brother was a culprit soon Bezos's camp starts talking to the press too. I asked my colleague to read for Gavin de Becker. Michael Sanchez has been among the people we've been speaking with and looking at strong leads point to political motives. That's from an interview Gavin de Becker gave to The Daily Beast and probably no coincidence.

The Daily Beast is owned by Jeff Bezos's friend Barry Diller. So then, in a non televised interview with Fox News, Michael Sanchez defends himself sort of. Here's anchor Howard Kurtz describing their conversation. The notion that Laurence Sanchez brother Michael Sanche, as a Hollywood talent manager, was somehow responsible for this. It didn't just sort of bubble up out of nowhere. Sources at am I and even the lawyer for David Pecker, the Inquirer owner who's a close friend of President Trump,

have kind of tried to finger him. But Michael Sanche has told me on the record that there are in fact multiple suspects, that he's never seen any of this salacious pick chers or tex uh and that in fact, any attempt to implicate him this is one. So Michael Sanchez is out there talking to the media denying everything, and this puts the National enquire in a very awkward position. The guy they're hinting as their confidential source is saying

he's not their confidential source. And if Michael isn't the source, then it sort of lent credibility to Bazos's theory that the Inquirers involved in some sort of political conspiracy. This was something the Inquirer absolutely wanted to shut down because they were already in hot water for something else. Tonight, the publisher of The National Inquirer making headlines of his own, David Pecker, granted immunity by federal prosecutors investigating Michael Cohen,

the President's former fixer. According to a source familiar with the matter, Pecker is a longtime friend of the President's who helped catch and kill negative stories about him, including, according to Cohen, having his company pay a woman for exclusive rights to her account of an alleged affair with Donald Trump. Before the Basos ordeal, the National Inquirer was caught in an unrelated scandal involving another rich guy and his alleged affair. In that case, it was Donald Trump

and an adult actress named Stormy Daniels. The publisher of The Inquirers a longtime friend of Trump's, and the tabloid went to unusual lengths to protect him. Essentially, they interviewed Stormy Daniels and other women who claimed to have damaging information about Trump. They bought the exclusive rights to the women's stories, and then they never ran the articles, and because the Inquirer had exclusive access, the women had no

way to get their stories out. This practice is known in the media business as catch and kill because they catch an elusive piece of information and then kill it by suppressing the story. This became a problem for The Inquirer after Trump became a candidate for president, because it could be seen as a violation of campaign finance laws. Not good. Eventually, their publisher am I, signed a deal with the U. S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District

of New York. If they violate the deal, their executives could be charged with a crime. So they were very sensitive to accusations of wrongdoing, especially charges that they were once again working with the Trump administration or say, the Saudi government. This is all happening in the background when the Inquirer goes to war with Bezos. So, with the catch and kill scandal hanging over their heads, the National Enquirers about to do something very, very unusual after the

allegations of Saudi involvement. The National enquires lawyers also hit the TV circuit. It's taboo for news organizations to talk about their off the record sources, but two people watching the saga unfold, a lawyer for The Inquirer's parent company am I, seemed to come very close to doing just that on TV. Here's attorney Elkan Abramo. It's on ABC with George Stephanopoulos. It absolutely is not extortion and not blackmail.

What happened was the story was given to the National Enquirer by a reliable source that had given information to the National Enquirer for seven years prior to this story. It was a source that was well known to both Mr Bezos and Miss Sanchez. Was it Michael Sanchez? I can't discuss who the source was. Uh just it's a confidential within a m I UM, so I'm not going to answer who the source was. It was somebody close

to both Bezos and Miss Sanchez. It's crazy to me that a lawyer for the papers on TV dropping hints about the confidential source of their story. But you've got to keep in mind that it's in the National Enquire's best interests if the story starts and stops with one leaker without any political conspiracies. So case closed, right, A brother sells out a sister, either for money, notoriety or jealousy. Really,

it all should have ended right there. But things were about to get even more complicated because, for whatever reason, Bezos and Gavin remained attached to the possibility that there were political motives behind the whole thing. So they take one more swing at saying the Saudi government had something to do with Bezos's leak romantic text messages. In March, Gavin wrote a guest article for The Daily Beast. In the essay, he again points a finger at Michael, but

he added reality is complicated. It can't always be boiled down to a simple narrative like the brother did it. Gavin theorized that by the time Sanchez gave the tabloid paper the Goods, the Inquirer had already seen text messages between the couple. In other words, Gavin suggested there was a second culprit, and he was now convinced that wrong doer was overseas. Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to bezos his

phone and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree if any Am I was aware of the details. Now this might sound outlandish, but Gavin and Bezos did have solid reasons to believe the government of Saudi Arabia was out to get him. For the past few months, an online army of Twitter accounts had been attacking Bezos. The accounts are believed to be linked to Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Their tweets called for a boycott of Amazon's website in

the Middle East. Here's a sample tweet. It's pretty horrible. We're after you. The Jew worshiper of money will go bankrupt by the will of God at the hands of Saudi Arabia, the owner of Amazon, and Shook is the owner of the Washington Post. Is the spiteful Jew who insults us every day. End quote. By the way, Bezos is not Jewish, but it didn't matter. The Saudi government's

hatred of Bezos was real. They blamed him for the Washington Post coverage of the murder of Jamaica Shoji, and though there was no real evidence that the Saudis were the original leakers to The Inquirer, people kind of lapped it up. Here's the thing, The idea that Bezos had been targeted because of his brave ownership of the Washington Post was kind of compelling, so public opinions swung over

to Bezos camp after that. The only question left is whether the Saudi theory was even real In this ring of the FBI and federal prosecutors set out to investigate the truth of this tangled saga was finally going to come out, That's next. Over the spring of the National Inquirer removed as editor in chief, and their parent company am I put out a remarkable statement explicitly denying that there was any conspiracy or mystery at all to the

origins of their story. Quote. The fact of the matter is it was Michael Sanchez who tipped the National enquir off to the affair on September ten, and over the course of four months, provided all of the materials for our investigation. His continued efforts to discuss and falsely represent our reporting and his role in it has waived any source confidentiality. There was no involvement by any other third party whatsoever. End quote. So the National Enquirer was no

longer dancing around it. Laurence Sanchez's brother was the sole leaker. It would seem like they broke a fundamental principle of journalism by revealing their secret source. But I actually have some sympathy for the National Enquirer here because I spent months talking to Michael when I was reporting my book Amazon Unbound. He asked that I used the following statement in my manuscript. Everything I did protected Jeff Lauren and

my family. I would never sell out anyone. I also spoke to Michael confidentially, meaning I wasn't planning on revealing him as a source. But when he read the conclusions in my book that he was the lone source of information to The Inquirer, he strongly disagreed and he started acting out against me. This time. Over the course of he emailed many high profile journalists about our conversations, accusing me of sloppy reporting and cherry picking facts to cast

him in a bad light. So because he outed himself as one of my sources, I feel free to discuss it now. See, Michael and Lauren had a complicated relationship. They fought over money, and they were frequently estranged. In our conversations, Michael had a lot of bad things to tell me about a sister. He criticized her intelligence, her personal relationships, and her skills as a broadcaster. He also thought very highly of himself, and he seemed to deeply

believe that he could control the media. It was a dangerous combination. One mystery that Michael cleared up for me was whether the National Enquirer ever had a dick pick from Jeff Bezos. Remember the Inquirer claimed they did, and they threatened to publish it. As all this was happening, Mike claimed in the press that he never sent the Inquirer dick pic, and he went so far to suggest that if such a photograph existed, then there must have

been a second leaguer. This really angered the Inquirer because again it opens the door to the suggestion that there might be some bigger conspiracy. So I'm talking to Michael about all this for several months, and one day, over drinks in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. He told me what I believe is the truth. He said that for weeks he tantalized the Inquirer editors with the notion

that he did have a dick pick. Then he met with one of their reporters in person and they faced time the papers to top editors, and this is when he showed them a photo that he had downloaded from a site called rent men dot com. So basically, he told me that he pulled one over on the Inquirer. They believed they had the incriminating photo, and they did have a dick pick, just not one belonging to Jeff Bezos.

When all this finally came out that Michael Sanchez was playing all sides, he was furious and he launched a volley of lawsuits against am I, the editor in chief of The Inquirer, Jeff Bezos, and Bezos's investigator, Gavin de Becker. He charged them with defamation, and ironically, Michael's lawsuits ended

up clarifying the whole matter. In the litigation, court documents showed Sanchez had signed a contract with the Inquirer paying him two hundred thousand dollars for the story, and the reporters and editors said under oath that Sanchez was their sole source of information and that authorities had nothing to do with it. Sanchez ended up losing most of those cases and had to pay Bezos two hundred and eight

thousand dollars for legal fees. It's pretty ironic that he paid out to Bezos almost the exact amount of money that he was paid by the Inquirer. In the end, Michael Sanchez's story is kind of sad. He could have been living large with Bezos and Lauren and their mega yachts and opulent vacation properties. But first he betrays his sister, and then he just keeps betraying himself by constantly gossiping

to the press and by launching these failed lawsuits. He loses his relationship with his sister, then his credibility, and then he loses a large sum of money. So was there any truth to the idea of a global conspiracy that the Saudi government may have hacked bezos phone in retaliation for the Washington Post coverage of the murder of Jamal Ka Shoji. Well, this was also a matter of

confusion and contradictory information. In early The Guardian published a report claiming that Bezos's phone was hacked that he had downloaded a piece of spyware called Pegasus. We're learning new details of an next ordinary claimed that Amazon CEO Jeff

bezos phone was hacked by Saudi Arabia. The Guardian reports an investigation ordered by Bezos blames the hacking on a personal message that apparently came from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed been solvon I talked to several security experts who weren't convinced there was any real evidence Bezos his phone was hacked, and on top of that, there was zero evidence that, even if he was hacked, that that was how his

private information had been leaked to the National Enquirer. And finally, both the FBI and the Manhattan d A looked into this tangle of accusations and dropped the matter without bringing any charges at all. So why did we hear so much about this story? Remember, Bezos wrote about it in his medium post, and his investigator brought it up in the media at least twice. Well, it suggests a few possibilities.

One is that Bezos sincerely believed that he was hacked, and the Saudis were involved, and he wanted to expose the Inquirer for their role in the treachery. Another option is more cynical, that Bezos didn't truly believe it, but he wanted to distract from the much more mundane to pressing story that he was caught cheating on his wife

and that his girlfriend's brother sold them out. I asked Craig Berman, the former Amazon VP, what he thought Bezos believed my guests, and again I'm speculating my guess as they he and his advisors felt comfortable that they had gotten to some facts and felt comfortable enough to go out and confront those facts. I think they executed it really well. I think they achieved what they were trying to do. Now, whether or not it was the true

fact or not, I don't know. And so if it was, if it was meant to UH to get people off the trail of something else, it may have been effective in that. I don't think we will ever know for sure if Bezos' phone was really hacked and if he thought the Saudis had tipped off the Inquirer. But I think ultimately Bezos and his handlers were happy to muddy the waters, letting the confusion and ambiguity about a possible

global conspiracy swirl around mate Bezos look good. It allowed him to keep alive the possibility that his brave support of his newspaper, The Washington Post was the source of his personal troubles. Around a year after the Inquirer story published, he spoken a memorial for Jamaica Shoji. Here he is addressing Kho's fiancee. No one should ever have to endure what you did. It is unimaginable, and you need to know that you are in our hearts. We are here

and you are not alone. In this epic battle between the National Enquirer and Jeff Bezos, it looked as if the Inquirer scored an early decisive victory. They broke a huge story about the richest man in the world having an affair with the wife of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, but ultimately Bezos one on the pr front. In the popular imagination, the story of the tech mogul and the tabloid got blurry to the extent

that people remember it at all. It's with a lot of confusion where the Saudi's involved, Trump the brother That's why Craig still marvels at how Bezos managed to pull off this victory against the news publication. He certainly did defeat in and spectacular fashion an outlet that was really really coming after him hard. It was a defeat that most public figures lose in our business of communications and public relations. You don't answer the door when Mike Wallace knocks,

and if the inquirer has something, It's probably true. Most people don't survive those, so Bezos one. But what about his company? Remember he spent twenty years building an image with an Amazon as a family man, and now their CEO wasn't an entirely different orbit of celebrity and notoriety. Tabloid newspapers and websites would follow his every move With his new girlfriend by his side. He chow up courtside at Wimbledon, at the super Bowl in Miami, even in

the DJ booth of a popular nightclub. Bezos was enjoying this a lot. He seemed to love flaunting his new relationship with Lauren and together indulging in the trappings of exorbitant wealth, and that was going to be a problem for the CEO of Amazon. Modesty and frugality were important values of the company, even more so with antitrust authorities investigating its growing power. The CEO image that Beazos had spent two decades cultivating of a devoted family man and

committed husband was a thing of the past. In a sense, his personal life had become incompatible with his professional responsibilities. He had a choice to make, and it would be a historic one. Here's Craig again. I think he does have a level of self awareness to kind of understand

what the impacts of those things are. And I think that maybe what may have ultimately contributed to him stepping away from the CEO role Bezos's resignation and his blast off into space on a Blue Origin rocket that's coming up in the next and final episode of Foundering. The Amazon story. Foundering is hosted by me brad Stone Sean When as our executive producer, Raimondo as our audio engineer.

Molly Nugent is our associate producer, Mark Million and Manner May Robin a Jello and Molly shoots our story editors special thanks to Mark Bergen. Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.