In Bezos vs. the National Enquirer, Everyone's a Dick

Something unusual happened this week: Suddenly we're rooting for the world's richest man.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer Parent Company AMI Of Extortion
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Jeff Bezos sends nudes. I don’t want to know this. But this is where we are. And so now, when I look at the book I got from Amazon at half off cover price, I have to think about them. That smile printed on the box that held a new grill you got delivered in two days means something else now. The rocket he’s built? Well it sure looks like something else now. I can’t even escape thinking about it on this website because it, like much of the internet, runs through Amazon Web Services. Jeff Bezos is everywhere: that’s how he became the richest man in the world. It was already impossible to escape Amazon’s labor abuses and monopolistic impulses, and now I can’t escape descriptions of Bezos's nudes.

When you’re the richest man in the world, you also have the richest dick in the world. And in Jeff Bezos' case, his rich dick led to the January announcement that he was getting divorced after 25 years of marriage because of an affair which, in turn, led to this Thursday's revelation that the richest man in the world was being blackmailed by the publisher of the National Enquirer.

"Something unusual happened to me yesterday," is the understated way Jeff Bezos started the open letter where he revealed that the National Enquirer was holding his nudes hostage so that the Washington Post (which Bezos owns) wouldn't publish "unsubstantiated rumors" about the Enquirer. By the end of the letter, which included graphic descriptions of his nude photos, something unusual happened to us, too, because suddenly we were in the position where we have to root for the richest man in the world—and his very rich dick.

Jeff Bezos poses for a photo with Lauren Sanchez, the woman with whom he had an eight-month affair, and Sanchez’s husband, Patrick Whitesell, who is (was?) reportedly Bezos’ friend.
Todd WilliamsonGetty Images

To understand why Jeff Bezos is suddenly a good guy, here's a little recent history: American Media Inc., or AMI, is run by David Pecker (stares directly into camera), a good friend of the president of the United States. Pecker has been in the news recently because he reportedly copped an immunity deal with federal prosecutors in the investigation over idiot lawyer Michael Cohen's payoffs of adult stars Stormy Daniels and Karen MacDougal for the president's own alleged wandering dick problems.

Now couple that with the president's preoccupation with Bezos (who he recently called "Jeff Bozo" because we live in grade school now) due to his ownership of the Washington Post, which has doggedly pursued Trump’s bullshit. As you might have guessed, that’s pissed Trump off enough that he’s trying to take it out on Amazon by doing things like demanding investigations into the postal service pricing of Amazon mailings and, well, you kinda get where this is all going.

Or at least, Bezos hopes you do. For a piece of writing that includes the phrase "his semi-erect manhood is penetrating the zipper of said garment" and includes full text of the shakedown emails AMI sent, there's a lot of wink wink nudge nudge going on. For someone that built an empire on books and owns a major newspaper, Bezos isn't a great writer and the rambling text isn't high on linear coherence (he has multiple asides about Saudi Arabia and AMI, for instance, which never really lead back to his dick), so it's unclear if the larger implications he's insinuating add up to anything.

If they do add up, then the richest man in the world may bring down a chunk of the tabloid industry (in addition to the Enquirer, AMI owns most of the supermarket checkout magazines, like In Touch, US Weekly, and Soap Opera Digest), the president of the United States, and, hell, why not the Saudi royal family, too. Bezos rolls them all up together in his wild letter and so, if he’s right, all praise goes to the richest man in the world, I guess.

But before we all start celebrating, it’s worth remembering that this is also the guy that oversees "inhuman" warehouse conditions, creates an environment where delivery drivers feel they need to piss in bottles, runs a brutal workplace culture ("one time I didn't sleep for four days straight," one employee told the New York Times), and pits municipalities against each other in a sort of civic Hunger Games to see which can cut Amazon the biggest tax deals to land its HQ2.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Addresses Economic Club Of New York
Drew AngererGetty Images

Sorry, but like a nude of a middle-aged guy in a harshly lit bathroom, the reality of Amazon is not pretty. But it’s also nearly inescapable. Sure you can—and should!—shop at an indie bookstore, but avoiding Amazon’s web technology is basically impossible. It’s the combination of ubiquity and efficiency-at-any-cost that has made Bezos so rich. And, in turn, that wealth that has given Bezos the ability to take a shot at AMI's Pecker (stares) who absolutely deserves everything that’s about to land on him.

Pecker (looks right at you) and Trump go back to a collaboration on the non-ironically titled Trump Style magazine in 1998. Once he joined the National Enquirer's parent company, Pecker practiced “catch and kill” for friends like Trump, buying the rights to embarrassing stories and then never printing them. Last year, in reporting about Harvey Weinstein, the New York Times described Weinstein as “so close to David J. Pecker” … that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable ‘F.O.P.,’ or ‘friend of Pecker.’” As Jeff Bezos learned this week, if you’re not an FOP, you get shaken down. (AMI said in a statement on Friday that it believes it acted legally, but will conduct an internal investigation.)

Shape & Men's Fitness Super Bowl Party, New York, America - 31 Jan 2014
David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of National Enquirer parent company AMI, is a friend of President Donald Trump.
Marion Curtis/Starpix/REX/Shutterstock

The reality is that in this story about dicks, everyone is one. In his open letter, Bezos calls his ownership of the Washington Post a “complexifier,” which is not a word, but which perfectly sums up the world we live in now. It’s a complexifier that our lives are so inextricably tied up with tech companies of questionable morals. It’s a complexifier that the president has dragged so much of our discourse into the tabloid muck from which he originally emerged. And it’s a complexifier that we’re counting on the richest dick in the world—who got that way through exploiting all sorts of our modern complexifiers—to save us from it all.

Dan Sinker is a journalist and cultural critical. He talks about politics on the Says Who? podcast.

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