Amazon has been, in recent years,
on this amazing trajectory.
Its stock skyrocketed last year.
Everything seemed to be going right for the company,
and, you know, finally for the first time
in many years, the company
is in a more uncertain place today
than it was six months or a year ago.
Early last month, Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie,
in a tweet announced that they were going
to be getting a divorce.
They had been married for 25 years,
they have four kids together,
and so it kind of came out of nowhere
that they were going to be getting a divorce.
It became more understandable later that week
when the National Enquirer came out and announced
that they had a story that Jeff Bezos
was having an affair with a TV personality,
or former TV personality, named Lauren Sánchez.
Jeff Bezos wasn't immediately critical of the story,
but he was apparently upset about the release
of the texts and hired an investigator
to find out who had leaked them.
Bezos posted on Medium, basically accused
the National Enquirer of trying to blackmail and extort him.
National Enquirer said that they had some racy photos
of Bezos, including a naked photo of Bezos himself,
threatened to release those photos,
publish them, if Bezos didn't call off his investigation.
Bezos and his Medium post basically said
he wasn't going to do it and he wasn't going
to give into "extortion and blackmail" as he termed it.
In terms of the divorce, many states
that have community property states
are pretty explicit about if there's a divorce,
how you split up the assets of a married couple.
Generally the split is a 50/50 split.
In Washington, that's not necessarily the case.
You have to split it in a fair
and equitable way, however that's determined.
Most of the assets that the Bezos' own
are tied up in Jeff's holdings of Amazon stock.
He owns about 16% of the company.
He's worth about $133 billion dollars, and so that stake
would be divvied up between him and MacKenzie.
That would give her about an 8% stake in Amazon,
which would make her and Jeff
the two largest individual stakeholders
in the company.
And so there is some concern
that Bezos could potentially
be distracted by the divorce and not give the running
of Amazon his full attention,
and that the company could suffer as a result of that.
Another thing that's been triggering concern was development
of facial recognition technology.
Amazon Web Services has developed
this facial recognition technology,
and that they've been licensing
it to law enforcement agencies,
and the concern about ICE using that to target immigrants,
and there are concerns that it ought
to be more regulation of that.
The other big thing that's been going
on with Amazon lately, of course,
has been the HQ2 stuff in New York.
Amazon launched this big search
where they were going to look for a second headquarters
to accompany the main headquarters they had in Seattle.
They ended up deciding on splitting
the second headquarters, HQ2, between New York
and northern Virginia.
Northern Virginia embraced the HQ2,
but in New York, there was immediate opposition
to the project.
One of the biggest was simply that many local officials
and citizens that were going to be affected by the project
were upset they hadn't been consulted,
that this was a backroom deal that was negotiated
between Amazon and Mayor de Blasio
and the governor's office.
Among those concerns
were that you were gonna have 25,000 people
that were coming into Queens, Long Island,
and there might not be the transit infrastructure
there, that it was going to overload
whatever transit was in place.
Plenty of concerns too about what the impact
was gonna be on housing,
that they were going to make prices go even higher
and make it even more unaffordable.
And the other issue that was brought up
had to do with unionization.
New York is a pro-union town.
Amazon is historically a fairly anti-union company,
and company officials were asked at city council meetings
about whether or not they would even be just neutral
on the prospect of unionization of their workers
of New York, and they couldn't even commit
to being neutral on that.
Jeff Bezos' proposal as part of this project
to have a helipad on the HQ2 headquarters in New York,
and the reason that struck
such a sour tone with many people
was because the idea that many of the people
that were affected by this project were gonna be stuck
in traffic or stuck on overcrowded transit
while Jeff Bezos was floating high above them
on his way to work, having an easy commute.
Here you have the richest man in the world,
and we're having a project that's catering
to his needs while not serving the broader interest.