Jeff Bezos was late. Amazon’s senior executives were meeting for the first time since the shocking revelations had ricocheted around the globe: the world’s richest man was romantically involved with a married former television host and getting divorced from his wife of 25 years.
As they waited for their boss that afternoon in February 2019, the conference room at Amazon’s Seattle offices vibrated with even more anxiety than usual. Finally, Bezos strode in and took his seat, looked up and surveyed the assembled group.
‘Raise your hand if you think you’ve had a harder week than I’ve had,’ he said, momentarily cutting through the tension by leading the group in a hearty laugh.
‘Just to set the record straight,’ he started slowly, ‘I did have a relationship with this woman. But the story is completely wrong and out of order. My wife and I have had good, healthy adult conversations about it. She is fine. The kids are fine. The media is having a field day. All of this is very distracting, so thank you for being focused on the business.’
With that, Bezos picked up a schedule outlining a new set of goals across the company, indicating it was time to get back to work.
As boss, he had always demanded that his staff behave with discretion and impeccable judgment. He ripped documents in half and walked out of rooms when employees fell short of expectations. By conducting an extra-marital relationship so carelessly that it became fodder for a salacious spread in the National Enquirer, he had failed to meet his own high standards.
Dozens of current and former executives would later say they were surprised and disappointed by Bezos’s affair. Their infallible and righteous leader was, after all, a flawed human. However, the revelations seemed to explain some curious changes in his recent behaviour.
Bezos had been increasingly hard to find in the Seattle offices over the past year. Meetings had been delayed or postponed.
There were also the inexplicable requests for helipads at Amazon’s new headquarters in Long Island City and Northern Virginia.
Now it transpired that Bezos’s new girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, was a helicopter pilot, and that he had taken flying lessons himself.
For the first time in his career, Bezos was cornered.
Amid the collapse of his marriage and the start of a new relationship, Bezos faced a scheming Hollywood fixer looking to peddle his most intimate text messages, a trashy supermarket tabloid bent on humiliating him, and a zealous media ready to lap up the whole drama and tear down the planet’s richest person.
And on the other side of the world, there was Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, embittered over coverage in the Bezos-owned Washington Post of the Saudi-ordered murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi. Some cyber-security experts would come to believe the Crown Prince had even hacked Bezos’s mobile phone.
The entire episode – tawdry and completely uncharacteristic of a man who had extolled the virtues of his wife and family
