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That a guy who is building the surveillance system for governments worldwide and who has serfdom-lite attitudes towards labor laws, is suddenly a sympathetic character on HN, is kind of surprising to me.



I share your sentiment of surprise.

Bezos' pretense that he's standing up for the powerless doesn't ring true to me ("If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?") when contrasted against his attitudes towards his employees' working conditions.

This story to me is Bezos did something, that while increasingly common in modern America, remains viewed as a foolish thing to do. Nothings going to change that, not a criminal extortion attempt by AEI, not even a heartfelt medium post. I see no dominant strategy Bezos can choose that avoids the Pyrrhic conclusion of his private photo being shared widely across the Internet on services he helped create.


The intercept has an article along those lines. https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/jeff-bezos-protests-the-...

It could be that they are both right in this situation.


He’a not a sympathetic character, but in this case I’m sympathetic to his actions.


While this is a prime case of what Russians call "Toad screwing a viper", it could be that just in this case, despite all his grandstanding, Bezos comes across as slightly more sympathetic than AMI.

Just because he is, by all indications, a terrible person (well, pretty regular for a founder) doesn't mean that one should blackmail him like that.


It is possible Bezos and AMI were negotiating something that was secret / illegal and AMI thought they’d gain the upper hand by this extortion act thinking Bezos wouldn’t want to risk his image and fortune.

Bezos rightly understood that AMI had no leverage and were on shaky ground.

Again impossible to formulate a compelling picture without more context.


The fact that this post was downvoted is not however surprising to me. Keep it up echo chamber!




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