Book excerpt: The untold story of how Jeff Bezos beat the tabloids

 When a gossip paper went after the Amazon CEO, he retaliated with the brutal, brilliant efficiency he used to build his business empire. An excerpt from the new book Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone

“Raise your hand if you think you’ve had a harder week than I’ve had.”

It was February 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.