Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

  After Bezos tweeted news of his divorce though, some of the people who had heard about the stock plan felt their confusion clearing up. Though Amazon disputed this interpretation and called it misleading, they felt that the plan wasn’t about trying to furnish workers with stock at all, but about Bezos remaining firmly in control of the company in the face of a costly divorce settlement that would end up reducing his stake in the company to 12 percent.

  Control—that was precisely the thing that had eluded Bezos over these stormy past few months. For the first time in his career, he was cornered by adversaries and the consequences of his own behavior. Amid the seemingly overlapping dissolution of his marriage and the start of a new relationship, Bezos faced a scheming Hollywood manager 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, who was embittered at Bezos for the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and who some cybersecurity experts would come to believe had hacked Bezos’s cell phone.

  The entire episode—prurient, tawdry, and completely uncharacteristic of a man who had extolled the virtues of his wife and family for twenty years—belonged more to the pages of a trashy novel than the business tomes that Amazon inspired. It was also Bezos’s biggest challenge to date: a test not only of his company’s well-honed ability to mold a media narrative but of his personal character, and his extraordinary ability to navigate out of a jam.

  Back in Seattle, the planning meeting stretched into the early evening. Harried finance execs scurried in and out of the room distributing spreadsheets. Bezos might not be able to control the scrum of tabloid press gleefully chronicling his sybaritic escapades with Lauren Sanchez, but he could control headcount growth across all of Amazon’s divisions.

  As the sun set over the Olympic mountains, casting a golden glow into the conference room, executives started furtively glancing at their phones and responding to texts from their significant others. Finally, at 7:30 p.m., senior vice president Jeff Blackburn spoke up and said what everyone else was thinking: “Hey Jeff, how long do you think this meeting is going to go? A lot of us have plans.” It was, after all, Valentine’s Day.

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Bezos, laughing. “I forgot about that.”

  * * *

  For years, Bezos wove the story of his courtship and marriage to MacKenzie Bezos (née Tuttle) into his public persona. In speeches, he routinely joked about his bachelorhood quest to find a woman resourceful enough to “get me out of a third-world prison,” as if the bookish MacKenzie, a novelist and English graduate from Princeton University, might one day rappel down from the roof of a Venezuelan jail with a lock pick in her teeth. In an interview in 2014, he said “my wife still claims to like me. I don’t question her aggressively on that,” and celebrated the virtues of doing the dishes every night, which he said was “the sexiest thing I do.” In the onstage conversation with his brother Mark at the 2017 Summit LA conference, they showed a photograph of the young couple in 1994, as they prepared for their historic drive to Seattle that led to the founding of Amazon.com.

  While Bezos and his handlers crafted the image of a doting husband and family man, he and his wife were developing different interests and diverging appetites for public attention. In the years following the creation of Amazon Studios, Bezos was visibly drawn to the energy and dynamism of Hollywood, attending the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, showing up at Hollywood movie premieres and hosting an annual holiday party every December at the family’s palatial property in Beverly Hills, high above the Sunset Strip.

  He also frequently traveled to Washington, D.C., alone, where he attended meetings of the Alfalfa Club, a gathering of powerful business people and politicians, and hosted salon dinners for Washington Post executives, government officials, and other luminaries. These took place in the private dining rooms of hip D.C. eateries, while his 27,000-square-foot Kalorama-neighborhood mansion, the former Textile Museum, underwent an extensive renovation. As he became ever more successful, the gravity in all of these star-studded rooms bent toward him; at parties, associates often had to intercept or gently pry away any unwelcome interlopers.

  By all accounts, Bezos relished the limelight. He was emerging from a chrysalis, no longer the spindly tech nerd from Seattle with a boisterous laugh but a fashionable dresser with the physique of a private trainer and the kind of exorbitant wealth and fame that drew awed consideration even in the upper echelons of the cosmopolitan elite.

  MacKenzie accompanied her husband to some of these events but by her own admission was not a social person. “Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking,” she told Vogue magazine. “The brevity of conversations, the number of them—it’s not my sweet spot.” Friends said both parents were committed to their four children and to keeping them as far away as possible from the corrosive impact of celebrity and garish wealth.

  Back then, even her efforts to shout about important causes ended up as more of an unintended whisper. In 2013, she started a charitable LLC called Bystander Revolution, a website “offering practical, crowdsourced advice about simple things individuals can do to defuse bullying.” The site featured videos from celebrities like Monica Lewinsky, Demi Lovato, Michael J. Fox, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Gavin de Becker, a noted security consultant, bestselling author, and close Bezos family friend, added a number of his own testimonials, including one outlining the universal warning signs of kids who might become mass shooters. To launch the project, MacKenzie enlisted the help of one of Amazon’s Silicon Valley PR firms, the Outcast Agency.

  People who worked on the campaign recalled MacKenzie as humble and laid-back but also zealously protective of her privacy. She wanted to put as little of herself and of her husband’s widening fame into the launch as possible. Perhaps as a result, Bystander Revolution was barely mentioned in the press when it debuted in 2014 and never gained much momentum. The organization sent out its last tweet two years later, and its website has barely been updated since. Journalists who set out to profile her over the years had to resort to analyzing “the public-facing introvert” in each of her two novels, as the New Yorker once put it, as well as her account in a 2013 TV interview of falling in love with Bezos’s booming laugh as a twenty-three-year-old research associate at D. E. Shaw (“It was love at first listen”) and getting engaged to him within three months of dating.

  By 2018, Bezos was already seeing Lauren Sanchez, legal documents later showed, while keeping up the appearance of an intact marriage. That April, the Bezos family went to Norway for MacKenzie’s birthday and stayed in an ice hotel; he posted a short video to Twitter on a dogsled, giggling gleefully. “It really was an incredible vacation,” he later told an onstage interviewer. “We got it all done in three and a half days. It was amazing.” A few months later, the couple launched the $2 billion Bezos Day One Fund, a philanthropy to address homelessness and build preschools in low-income neighborhoods.

  In October, they hosted another edition of Campfire, the annual family camp/conference at the Four Seasons Resort in Santa Barbara—the event that Bezos liked to call “the highlight of his year.” Once again, guests and their families flew in on private planes, all paid for by Amazon, and were festooned with extravagant gifts in their hotel rooms. That year, author Michael Lewis spoke about his new book about the Trump presidency, The Fifth Risk, Jane Goodall talked about climate change, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared via satellite. Maria Toorpakai Wazir, a Pakistani athlete, won over attendees with her experience of having to impersonate a boy for sixteen years so she could play competitive squash. On the last night, Jeff Tweedy, Dave Matthews, Jon Bon Jovi, St. Vincent, and others attending the event got on stage and jammed.

  To the guests who knew them personally, Bezos and MacKenzie seemed normal and affectionate that wee
kend. But who can really know what happens within the private confines of a marriage? Two months later, MacKenzie was absent at the annual Amazon Studios Christmas party at Bezos’s home in Beverly Hills. By his side instead was Lauren Sanchez, as well as her older brother, Michael.

  Sanchez, then forty-eight, was an exuberant extrovert. The wife of Patrick Whitesell, the powerful chairman of the Endeavor talent agency, she personally knew most of the two hundred or so assembled guests at the party, including Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Barbra Streisand, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, and Alex Rodriguez. Some had attended her star-studded 2005 wedding to Whitesell.

  Ebullient and curvaceous, with a penchant for walking into a room and embracing everybody in it, Sanchez was supremely comfortable under the high-wattage lights in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. In many ways, she was the opposite of MacKenzie. If Bezos was ever imprisoned in Venezuela, she would likely march into the jail, beguile all the guards, and persuade at least one into unlocking the cell door voluntarily.

  Like Bezos, Sanchez was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their families didn’t know one another, but the couple would later chart all the coincidental overlap among their relatives at places such as the Bank of New Mexico, where Jackie and Mike Bezos first met and where her cousin had once worked. Sanchez’s father, Ray, ran a local flight school, Golden Airways, and owned ten planes. Her mother, Eleanor, also had a pilot’s license, and when Sanchez was young was seriously injured in a plane crash after she was practicing stalls with a flight instructor and the engine wouldn’t restart.

  Her parents divorced when Sanchez was eight years old, ending a contentious marriage wracked by mutual recriminations of infidelity. Sanchez and her older brothers, Paul and Michael, went to live with their mom, who remarried three more times and started a peripatetic career that would lead her to become an assistant deputy mayor of Los Angeles and later an administration executive at Columbia University. While Sanchez was dyslexic and struggled academically in school, she won attention as a model and was crowned Miss Junior America New Mexico in 1987. After high school, she attended the University of Southern California and then dropped out to start a career in local broadcast news.

  In the late nineties, Sanchez became a correspondent on the syndicated gossip magazine program Extra and then a morning anchor on Fox’s Good Day LA. She later hosted the first season of the popular reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance and cameoed in major films (that’s her playing a news reporter, ninety-one minutes into Fight Club). She broke off at least three engagements over the years and had a son with NFL player Tony Gonzalez before marrying Whitesell, the Hollywood superagent, and having a son and a daughter.

  Bezos reportedly met Sanchez through Whitesell and reconnected with her at his 2016 Amazon Studios party in L.A. for Manchester by the Sea. After her marriage faltered, she bonded with Bezos over their shared love of flying. The exact origin of the romance is unknown, though by the beginning of 2018, her helicopter company, Black Ops Aviation, was filming documentary videos for Blue Origin and posting them to YouTube.

  In March 2018, Bezos invited Sanchez to Palm Springs to attend the third annual MARS conference, his invite-only symposium for luminaries in space travel, artificial intelligence, and robotics. MacKenzie didn’t attend, while Sanchez’s voice can be heard in the background of a video clip of Bezos playing table tennis at the event against a Japanese robot.

  A few weeks later, Sanchez told her brother, Michael, that she wanted to introduce him to her new beau. In April, they had dinner at the Hearth & Hound, a hip West Hollywood restaurant, accompanied by Michael Sanchez’s husband and two other friends. Michael sat across from Bezos and hit it off with Amazon’s CEO. He also emerged alarmed about how the couple openly expressed their affections for each other, potentially within sight of the local paparazzi while both were still married to their respective spouses.

  In retrospect, Bezos did carry on the relationship with curious disregard for public reaction. He also brought Sanchez to Seattle with her mother and brother, where they got a VIP tour of the Spheres, and to Washington, D.C., where he showed her the Washington Post printing presses. She attended the ninth launch of New Shepard that summer and helped produce an inspirational two-minute video for Blue Origin featuring aerial shots of the rocket, accompanied by a rare voice-over by Bezos himself, waxing philosophically about Blue’s mission as the song “Your Blue Room” by U2 and Brian Eno plays in the background. “The human need to explore is deep within all of us,” he intones at the start of the video.

  By late summer of 2018, Michael Sanchez was growing even more anxious about the couple’s brazenness. A handsome, gay Trump supporter and skilled amateur tennis player with a predilection for double-bridged Gucci eyeglasses, his career had taken a much different path than his sister’s. After working at the Hollywood talent agency ICM Partners and then in sales and marketing for MTV, he started Axis Management, a talent and PR agency that represented a slate of right-wing cable news pundits and reality television stars. In 2007, he cofounded Dead of Winter Productions and produced the horror film Killer Movie (with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 19 percent). The film included a small role for his sister as a TV reporter named “Margo Moorhead.” After the movie bombed, one of the film’s financiers sued him, claiming he was owed money. To protect his assets, Michael Sanchez declared bankruptcy in 2010; his public filings showed that he owed his sister $165,000.

  Sanchez bickered with his sister over the years over financial issues and they were frequently estranged. But Michael was also a groomsman at his sister’s wedding to Whitesell and godfather to their son. When she started a secret exchange of text messages and intimate photographs with Bezos, she frequently forwarded his messages to Michael. The sibling relationship was, to put it mildly, unusual.

  But all of that was happening well outside Bezos’s line of sight. He was enthralled by the adventurous Sanchez and by nature was not predisposed to be paranoid or immediately skeptical of anyone—especially not the brother of his new paramour. “It’s better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over,” was essentially his philosophy, according to a friend.

  * * *

  Over the summer of 2018, as the romance between Bezos and Sanchez intensified, the editors of the National Enquirer started investigating Bezos’s personal life. The famously voyeuristic tabloid, which had paid sources for sensationalist gossip since the 1950s, was coming off a catastrophic few years. In addition to declining newsstand sales, its publisher, the unfortunately named David Pecker, had directed the paper to “catch and kill” stories about his friend Donald Trump’s marital infidelity, a practice that had drawn the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., into the bottomless pit of Trumpworld scandal. Pecker’s deputy, chief content officer Dylan Howard, who oversaw all forty of AMI’s media properties, including RadarOnline, Men’s Journal, and Us Weekly, had also been outed by the New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow for trying to discredit accusers of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

  Howard was a short and stout thirty-six-year-old Australian and an acid-penned chronicler of the hypocrisies and indiscretions of American celebrities. The journalistic force behind such tabloid supernovas as Mel Gibson’s recorded anti-Semitic rants and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, Howard was by nature protective of his work and combative toward perceived rivals. When the Washington Post aggressively covered AMI’s catch-and-kill problems, a bristling Howard enthusiastically authorized a tough look at its wealthy owner’s life.

  One line of inquiry, according to an email that went out to AMI reporters from the company’s news desk in late summer, was to examine Bezos’s relationship with the family of his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, and why the CEO hadn’t contacted them as Jorgensen was dying in 2015. The memo didn’t mention anything about an extramarital affair.

  What happened the very next day is difficult to dismiss as simply a coincidenc
e. But however you interpret the unlikely events that transpired over the next year, such coincidences abound in the volumes of interview transcripts, email and text message records, and other evidence that would later accumulate in the myriad of civil and criminal cases that were the primary legacy of the entire saga.

  On Monday, September 10, Michael Sanchez wrote an email to Andrea Simpson, an L.A.-based reporter for AMI. Sanchez and Simpson were close friends; he regularly sent her news about his clients, like his sister’s one-day return to host Extra that month, and they had once gotten tattoos together on a whim. (His, on his forearm, read “Je suis la tempête.”)

  In his email, Michael Sanchez said he had a hot tip for Simpson. A friend, he wrote, worked for a well-known “Bill Gates type” who was married and having an affair with “a B-list married actress.” The friend, Sanchez wrote, had compromising photos of the couple but wanted a six-figure payout for the scoop. Sanchez claimed to be working as the middleman.

  Simpson and her editors in New York could only guess at the identities of the mystery lovers. In emails later made public as part of a lawsuit Michael Sanchez filed against AMI in L.A. district court, the journalists speculated about figures like Evan Spiegel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell. For weeks, Sanchez kept them guessing and tried to bump up his asking price by hinting at the possibility that the story could end up with a British tabloid. In early October, he teased the matter further, meeting with Simpson and showing her text messages and photos with the faces obscured. But the gossip reporter suspected anyway. “Just doing a look around and by the body, I think it may be Jeff Bezos,” she wrote to her New York bosses.