Bloomberg
“Raise your hand if you think you’ve had a harder week than I’ve had.”
It was Feb. 14, 2019, in the early afternoon, and for perhaps the first time in the 25-year history of Amazon.com Inc., Jeff Bezos was prepared to explain himself to his employees.
Bezos was a master compartmentalizer; his ability to keep the intricate threads of his personal and professional lives separate was unrivaled. This talent had allowed him to build Amazon while also running a space company, Blue Origin LLC, and reviving the Washington Post—all while keeping his family life private. But those threads had gotten tangled. Bezos, a father of four, was the subject of tabloid stories in the National Enquirer about his relationship with a married former television host.Rather than doing what most billionaires do under such scrutiny—keep quiet and wait for the storm to pass—Bezos had gone public. He’d written a salacious blog post that included descriptions of photos the Enquirer claimed it had acquired—among them: a “below the belt selfie.” He’d suggested that the paper was doing this as political retribution for the Post’s reporting on the Enquirer’s connections to the Trump administration.
Now, facing Amazon’s leadership group, the S-team, Bezos addressed the elephant in the room. “The story is completely wrong and out of order,” he said. “MacKenzie and I have had good, healthy, adult conversations about it. She is fine. The kids are fine. The media is having a field day.” Then he tried to refocus the conversation on the matter at hand: personnel projections for the current year. “All of this is very distracting, so thank you for being focused on the business,” he said.
The affair came as a shock to most senior executives, though recently some had noticed changes in their boss’s behavior. Meetings for Op1, Amazon’s term for its annual late-summer planning cycle, had been delayed or postponed; longtime deputies were finding it difficult to get time on his calendar. There were also those helipads that Amazon had requested for its planned outposts in New York City and Arlington, Va. These had enraged local officials, already skeptical about giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to a company with a trillion-dollar market value, and had contributed to the scrapping of a planned second headquarters in Queens.
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