Past few weeks have been rough for Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com and world's wealthiest man as he struggled on personal front with a murky affair laid bare in public, a 25 year old marriage gone awry and an ambitious business plan abandoned.
He was embroiled in a tabloid scandal when he alleged "blackmail and extortion" by National Enquirer parent company American Media Inc. He claimed that the National Enquirer threatened him that it would publish his explicit personal photos if he did not stop investigating how the tabloid got his private exchanges with his mistress.
Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, made public his interactions with American Media Inc., in his blog on Medium.com. The 54-year-old billionaire who is worth $140 billion had an alleged affair with Lauren Sanchez, a 49-year-old former news anchor and wife of Patrick Whitesell, one of Hollywood's most powerful agents.
He said that the National Enquirer wanted him to announce publicly that the tabloid's coverage was not politically motivated. Bezos' allegations have added another twist to a high-profile clash between the world's richest man and the leader of America's best known tabloid.
His much publicized divorce ending his marriage of 25 years with his wife MacKenzie who is alleged to have uncovered his alleged affair while looking at his plane's flight manifest showed Sanchez's name as the only on the passenger list. The estranged couple has four children together.
All this coupled with his scrapped plans to invest $2.5 billion and hire 25,000 people for a giant new office in New York city, a lost opportunity in the face of opposition from state and local politicians.
But, despite all these troubles surrounding Bezos, the e-commerce giant Amazon he is at the helm of will still run fine as a deep management team is in charge of the company's day-to-day functioning. The deep bench of executives keep the business up and running without any hitch even at this time.