Until recently, I regarded Jeff Bezos as the Genghis Khan of commerce. The founder of Amazon struck me as being the kind of man whose greatest pleasure lay in devastating the businesses of his rivals, then celebrating his conquest by quaffing their tears from the upside-down skull of the first competitor he ever crushed.
A businessman with a head so hard that it was difficult to imagine something so soft as hair had ever taken root there; at best he might have had lots of sharp needles sticking out of his scalp, like the cenobite in the Hellraiser movies. I might add that The New York Times exposé a few years back, with its claims of adults crying at their desks, did nothing to dispel the impression of a man driven by an unparalleled will-to-power, a master strategist who made few (if any) mistakes.
Yet, recent events have caused me to doubt the accuracy of this image, and to wonder about Bezos’s judgement. The rot first set in this time last year, when Bezos was forced to engage in a very embarrassing face-off with the National Enquirer over some revealing selfies he had taken and sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which had subsequently fallen into the tabloid’s possession. Surely the infallible god-emperor of Amazon was more intelligent than a horny teenager? Surely he knew better than to snap a pic of his John Thomas and think it would stay private? Well, apparently not.
That said, the way he handled it — a rapid escalation and invitation to war — impressed me; those were some nerves of steel right there, that was the Genghis Bezos I believed in. And the strategy worked, the photo remains under wraps and Bezos’s loins remain an enigma; none of us need ever think about them again and everything makes sense again.
Except that recently I learned something else about Bezos which threatens once again to subvert the image I have of him as a ruthless, logical, master strategist: he takes advice from psychics. At least that’s what his girlfriend’s estranged brother Michael Sanchez claims in a lawsuit he has filed against the Amazon owner for “defamation”.
Suddenly I had an image of Bezos at night, driving his Honda Accord down some lost highway in New Mexico, bald pate glinting in the moonlight, before screeching to a halt by the shack of a roadside psychic, a neon sign of a palm buzzing in the darkness. He steps inside to seek of the medium within the advice of the spirits on this burning question: should he or should he not keep his affair with Lauren Sanchez a secret? The medium closes her eyes, establishes contact with the mystic forces of the Other Side, and then following a long pause, they reply:
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Karl Marx could have coined this slogan.
Contemporary Marxists put the acquisition of power above all other ethic. So we have the formation of the corrupt influence cycles of the Obama crowd. Obama met with Soros, for example, who put ideas in his head and Soros made billions of dollars by betting that Obama would act on some of his “economic advice”. Soros gave campaign contributions, completing the cycle.
The gutter press, employing well educated but immature journalists, then praise the Soros’s, Epsteins and Bezos’s for their imaginary financial acumen, creating the illusion that the were not trading on inside information. Epstein’s prostitutes were a part of this system, creating Kompromat.
“as if communing with deceased relatives was a fairly straightforward matter ” a bit like going into settings on your smartphone, finding the afterlife’s Wi-Fi there and pressing “connect”.”
This is all we have to do according to E.M.Forster.