Bezos Pulls Out

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man except for Vladimir Putin, is having a rough year. First he announced his divorce, but that turned out to be his way of getting ahead of the National Enquirer’s story about his relationship with Lauren Sanchez. That turned even uglier when Bezos revealed AMI threatened to publicize his dick pics if he didn’t back away from investigating AMI. Now it’s been revealed that his mistress was the one who leaked those photos in the first place, making Bezos looking foolish for conspiracy-mongering.

So maybe Bezos is just trying to change the subject by pulling out of Amazon’s deal with Long Island City, Queens, over local objections to the city and state reaching a massive deal without consulting the people who, y’know, actually live in the area that would have been destroyed. That area just happens to lie in the district represented in Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Somebody on Amazon’s board told the Times some version of this paraphrased sentence:

The meetings between Amazon and Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio before the company decided to come to New York led executives to believe that there would be greater political support than turned out to be the case.

“Political support” isn’t what was lacking, Mr. Bezos. Popular support — local support — is what nobody bothered to get beforehand.