Jeff Bezos Is No Hero

The world’s richest man had a week unlike any in his life. Last Thursday, in a long post on the website Medium, Jeff Bezos accused the National Enquirer of extorting him with compromising photos. The tabloid had published lurid texts that proved that the Amazon founder and CEO, whose divorce from his wife of 25 years was already pending, was having an affair. His 2,200-word gambit didn’t just neutralize the alleged scheme; it brought Bezos seemingly universal adulation. “I think he single-handedly changed the first line of his obituary, from Silicon Valley billionaire to First Amendment defender,” Poynter vice president Kelly McBride told CNN’s Brian Stelter. “And that’s quite remarkable.’’

The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, didn’t go quite that far, but its editorial board lauded him for choosing “to expose what lies behind the National Enquirer’s claim to be a practitioner of newsgathering.... Mr. Bezos’s action has exposed the truth: that its business lies not in honest journalism but in sleazy tactics and dirty tricks.”

Since purchasing Post for $250 million in 2013, Bezos has become one of the most important figures in journalism. Never particularly interested in the industry before, he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars revitalizing the paper, which now employs around 900 journalists, with bureaus around the world. This has brought him into conflict with President Trump, who repeatedly threatens Amazon over what he believes is unfair coverage in the Post. But the Post, and the political influence it has brought Bezos, has also created a crucial moat for him and for Amazon at a time when Congress is scrutinizing the company’s business practices and the public’s opinion of Big Tech is souring.

Despite Bezos’s victory over the National Enquirer—and by extension the president, who enjoys a mutually beneficial relationship with the paper’s publisher, David Pecker—there’s growing tension between Bezos’s role as the savior of one of America’s most important news organizations and his role overseeing an anti-democratic corporate behemoth. Or there should be, anyway. His missive against the Enquirer may have been righteous, but someone with Bezos’s enormous economic and political power—especially given Amazon’s myriad controversies—deserves much more skepticism and much less hero worship.

As Bezos was being applauded for his takedown of the Enquirer, Amazon was stepping up its fight with lawmakers in New York City, who had questioned the billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives that the city and state had offered to one of the world’s most successful companies. On Friday, less than 24 hours after Bezos’s Medium post went live, the Post reported that Amazon was considering pulling out of New York altogether if skeptical members of the city council and state Senate didn’t get on board. “No specific plans to abandon New York have been made,” the Post reported. “And it is possible that Amazon would try to use a threat to withdraw to put pressure on New York officials.”

It was, as the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat noted, a different kind of extortion scheme. “Sure it may seem a little mobbed up when they threaten to shoot your economy, even as they’re also showing up at a meeting to supposedly ‘negotiate,’” Westneat wrote. “It’s just business to them.” That same week, Amazon signed a deal with Virginia that would grant the company generous tax breaks and incentives—and would require the state to give a “heads up” to the company if anyone submitted Freedom of Information Act requests about the company. That’s not exactly the kind of behavior you would expect from a “First Amendment defender.”

This is how Amazon does business, as Seattle knows all too well. Last fall, Amazon recently halted construction of new buildings there—and threatened to leave the city altogether—in protest of a new tax on large companies to fund affordable housing. The Seattle area has the third-largest homeless population in the country, behind only New York and Los Angeles, according to federal statistics. But Amazon’s threats got the city’s attention. “That really changed things overnight,” Katie Wilson, of Seattle’s Transit Riders Union, told The Atlantic. “People got scared.” Westnead, in his column, cast it as another mafioso move: “Nice economy you’ve got there, Seattle. Shame if something happened to it.” The city council repealed the tax less than a month after passing it unanimously.

Amazon’s ruthless behavior isn’t limited to its dealings with city and state governments. The company began as an online bookstore which ruthlessly undercut publishers; Bezos reportedly instructed the company to “approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” While definitive data doesn’t exist, Amazon is routinely blamed for the downturn in bookstores over the past two decades and the decline in author earnings. For much of its existence, the company skimped on sales tax, which it only recently began paying in all 50 states. Over the last several years, there have been a series of investigations into the poor treatment of the company’s warehouse and delivery workers, who often endure long shifts in deplorable conditions—sometimes literally working themselves to death.

And yet, Amazon has proved largely immune to this negative press. Like other Big Tech companies, notably Google, it has stayed popular with the general public, even as it has become one of the most powerful entities on the planet. Polling released last fall found that Amazon was more trusted by Americans than the government and the press—and that, for Democrats, it was the most trusted institution in the entire country. The low cost and convenience of Amazon surely has a lot to do with that, but Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post likely has helped, particularly with elites.

But Amazon’s immunity is unlikely to last. People are slowly growing more skeptical of the Silicon Valley giants. In the aftermath of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, the favorability of Amazon—and other tech companies—plunged, a sign that increased scrutiny of one tech company can adversely impact the others. It ended the year both popular and trusted, but the earlier dip suggests that sustained scrutiny of the tech giant could lead to lasting damage.

The biggest threat to Amazon’s reputation is itself. As the company expands its operations to Washington, D.C, and New York City, more Americans will experience firsthand what Seattle residents have lived with for years—and those Americans happen to live in the two biggest journalism markets in the country. The ensuing battles with residents, activists, and politicians, as well as stories of worker trauma, will gain significantly more national coverage than before.

At the same time, there is an increasing bipartisan consensus that tech companies like Amazon—which has enormous economic power in a number of retail sectors—have grown too large and too powerful. The public testimony of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last year was just the beginning of a larger project that will draw greater attention to the misdeeds of every large technological company. Several Democratic presidential candidates, notably Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, have called for increased scrutiny and regulation of tech giants like Amazon.

Bezos may see the Post and his other extracurricular projects as armor for these fights. Citing the paper’s grandiloquent motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” he has made the case that owning the Post is a higher civic calling. “Certain institutions have a very important role in making sure there is light, and I think The Washington Post has a seat, an important seat to do that, because we happen to be located here in the capital city of the United States of America,” Bezos told Post editor Marty Baron back in 2016. In last week’s Medium post, he wrote, “The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of the Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life...”

But Bezos did not become one of the wealthiest people in the world out of a commitment to civic engagement. On the contrary, in building Amazon into a $1 trillion company, he has often worked against the public interest. He is a cunning and ruthless man, and there’s every reason to believe he bought the Post for strategic, not civic reasons: to wield greater power and influence in Washington, where Amazon’s lobbying spending has skyrocketed in the years that Bezos has owned the paper.

Bezos’s Medium post, much like his purchase of the Post, has been portrayed as daring when in fact it was calculating. The essay was simply the wisest course of action for him, given the situation. American Media Inc, the Enquirer’s parent company, wanted to neutralize the Post’s coverage of its relationship with Trump, so it demanded that Bezos release a statement that he has “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” Bezos knew that he would forever lose the loyalty of the Post staff with such a statement. He also knew that the compromising photos might leak anyway. But above all, perhaps, he knew that he would receive near-unanimous praise from the Fourth Estate, including the large plot that he owns.

When two movies come out on the same topic, it’s a banner day for cultural criticism. The “twin film” phenomenon—such as the recent Hollywood treatments of the opioid crisis, Ben Is Back and Beautiful Boy—suggests that a certain theme is resonating deeply with the public. It has a long history: Oscar Wilde versus The Trials of Oscar Wilde in 1960, The Conversation versus The Parallax View in 1974, Armageddon versus Deep Impact in 1998. At the dawn of 2019, our twin film obsession is Fyre Fraud versus Fyre, streaming on Hulu and Netflix, respectively. Both movies seem to channel the spirit of the times, bedeviled by grifters and cheats, all presided over by the occupant of the White House. But in the case of Netflix’s Fyre, the grift may have seeped into the production of the film itself.

Both documentaries purport to tell the “real” story behind the Fyre Festival debacle of 2017, in which the charlatan Billy McFarland ripped off customers who had bought into an Instagram-fueled dream of partying with supermodels in the Bahamas. The dream never materialized—instead of champagne and concerts and luxury villas, ticket-holders encountered FEMA tents, empty beaches, and a transportation crisis. McFarland left behind a trail of unpaid debts, notably to the residents of Great Exuma itself, and ended up in jail for wire fraud.

The initial controversy surrounding the two documentaries centered on the timing of their release: The Hulu documentary was originally supposed to be a series, but was rushed into early release in feature-length form to beat Netflix to the punch. Then there were accusations from the Netflix camp that Hulu had behaved unethically by paying McFarland to appear in its documentary. Fyre director Chris Smith said, “After spending time with so many people who had such a negative impact on their lives from their experience on Fyre, it felt particularly wrong to us for him to be benefiting” from an interview payment.

Since that mudslinging episode, however, a new source of intrigue has emerged. The two movies ended up contextualizing their stories quite differently. Hulu’s Fyre Fraud focused on social media marketing agency FuckJerry—which is trying to rebrand as Jerry Media—and its complicity in McFarland’s doomed project. But Netflix’s Fyre was mysteriously quiet on that issue, instead highlighting eye-poppingly nefarious anecdotes, like event producer Andy King’s claim that he came very close to performing fellatio on a customs official to extract a detained shipment of Evian water.

Now, documents show that the CEO of FuckJerry, Mick Purzycki, who was a producer of Fyre, also claimed to have “final cut” over the documentary while it was being put together. Though his editing authority was later “superseded by the distribution agreement where the final cut was with the director,” according to Netflix, the way the movie was produced suggests that FuckJerry used the film to launder the troubled company’s reputation. And what appeared to be a story of competing films turns out to be something else: A genuine investigative documentary struggling for attention against a shadow public relations campaign.

The tale of the warring documentaries begins in May 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the Fyre Festival disaster. Neither documentary made this clear, but Billy McFarland himself started working on a “recovery documentary” as soon as Fyre Festival began to fall apart. He called on Michael Swaigen, a freelance cinematographer, to grab some onsite footage. Swaigen had shot the viral commercial for Fyre Festival that got the whole show rolling, as well as behind-the-scenes footage that is shown in the Netflix doc.

Swaigen is also an associate producer of Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and appears in that documentary: He’s the guy with the glasses and deadpan expression who wonders why everybody is so obsessed with Great Exuma. (“I guess it’s an island with a bunch of pigs,” he observes.) Some of his footage ended up in the Netflix movie because it was owned by his contractor at the time, Matte Projects, whose co-founder Brett Kincaid also co-produced Fyre.

As Fyre Festival melted down, McFarland told Swaigen, “We have to make a recovery documentary.” McFarland was “trying to save face,” Swaigen told me, “but that was probably secondary to trying to recoup money for investors, and he thought that a documentary was going to make a bunch of money.” Swaigen began to film with a documentary in mind. 

At the same time, a Vice reporter named Gabrielle Bluestone was heading up the site’s reporting on Fyre Festival: the $250,000 payment to Kendall Jenner for a single Instagram post about Fyre Festival; the FEMA tents; and the payroll collapse that left Fyre Festival employees unpaid. After Swaigen returned to California from the “recovery” shoot, McFarland dropped out of contact, leaving him “screwed out of money,” he said, and wondering what to do with his footage. (McFarland would occasionally pop up to drop him small batches of money via Venmo, $500 here and there.) It was at this stage that Bluestone contacted him, saying some “heavy hitters” were interested in making a documentary, including Brendan Fitzgerald, who founded the Viceland cable channel (he eventually dropped out of the project).

Vice flew Swaigen out to New York in October of 2017, where he met with Bluestone, Fitzgerald, and the award-winning filmmaker Chris Smith. According to a Netflix spokesman, it was Smith who had initially approached Vice with an idea for a documentary about Fyre Festival in August 2017. But Swaigen recalls asking Smith what he knew about Fyre Festival and discovering that Smith “knew absolutely nothing.” Swaigen was shown around the Vice offices—the microbrew beer taps, the floors of millennials at work—and Smith viewed some of his footage. Swaigen was wary of Vice’s flashy ethos, and left feeling dubious about the project.

At this point, Swaigen recalled, “there was no talk of FuckJerry” being involved in Vice’s film. It was FuckJerry that had hyped up the festival into an Instagram craze, using mysterious orange squares to tease its announcement. According to the Hulu documentary, FuckJerry was aware of the problems in the festival’s production, but proceeded full steam ahead anyway. A source from Vice explained that the Vice/Smith team collectively approached Jerry Media for footage in December 2017, which Netflix also confirmed.

After the Vice office visit, Swaigen returned to California, where he met with Ja Rule, the foremost celebrity involved in Fyre Festival, to find out his angle on the post-Fyre landscape. Ja Rule mentioned that Hulu was in talks to make a documentary. Swaigen emailed the filmmaker Jenner Furst a photograph of himself with McFarland, and Furst replied immediately. “It just felt better than anything that I had been through with [Vice],” Swaigen said.

The key difference between the Hulu project and the Vice project, Swaigen said, was that “it didn’t feel like anything shady.” At this point, Swaigen was “spying with integrity,” in his words, feeding information about the Vice documentary back to the other camp. In a statement, Cinemart, the company that produced Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, told me that “Michael was a big part of this story and his investigation during the aftermath of the festival was really insightful. We are grateful that Michael took everything into consideration when deciding who he would work with and that he ultimately chose to work with us.”

In January of 2018, Swaigen met with Mick Purzycki, who had been busy rebranding FuckJerry as a media “studio” through its subsidiary Jerry Media. The new studio’s first project was Fyre, which was FuckJerry’s first ever film production. Purzycki was by now a producer of the documentary; Swaigen speculates that he managed to finagle that role because Purzycki had direct knowledge of the Fyre debacle and could possibly negotiate an appearance from McFarland.

By February of 2018, Swaigen says, Bluestone and Fitzgerald had stopped talking to him. Furthermore, there was “no more talk of Vice” from director Chris Smith or Purzycki. Gabrielle Bluestone remains one of the documentary’s executive producers, but Purzycki told Swaigen that Vice was “kind of still involved in this peripheral sense, but Chris’s production company is running the team. And we’re Jerry Media now,” according to Swaigen.

After early screenings at Cannes in May 2018, Smith took Fyre to Netflix, which announced its acquisition of Fyre on December 10. Netflix said that the movie was directed by Smith, and that the executive producers were Elliot Tebele and James Ohliger from Jerry Media; Gabrielle Bluestone of Vice; and Max Pollack, Matthew Rowean, and Brett Kincaid of Matte Projects. So by the time of Netflix’s announcement, the producer list had become dominated by personnel from companies contracted directly by Fyre Festival: The show was run by Matte Projects (Swaigen’s employer, which owned most of the behind-the-scenes footage you see in Fyre) and Jerry Media itself. Although the Vice logo appears in the movie’s credits, the company seems to have been edged out. 

FuckJerry has some serious answering to do related to its involvement in Fyre Festival. The company released a statement saying that “all actions taken by Jerry Media were done at the direction of the Fyre Festival,” suggesting that it was just as innocent as the scammed ticket-holders. But as several journalists have observed, none of the tickets would ever have been sold if it hadn’t been for FuckJerry’s efforts to spam social media with Fyre’s false advertisements. Furthermore, former FuckJerry employee Oren Aks has said that the company was aware of Fyre Festival’s problems far earlier than it has claimed, and therefore needs to be held accountable in Billy McFarland’s fraud.

Of course, Jerry Media denies such accusations. But the accusations at least appeared in the Cinemart/Hulu documentary, which has no vested interest in exonerating any parties involved; they did not appear in the Netflix documentary, which was co-produced by the CEO of Jerry Media and several other FuckJerry staffers, including its founder Elliot Tebele, who is now receiving an intense backlash for plagiarizing other creatives’ content, led by the social media hashtag #FuckFuckJerry. In fact, Fyre posits that the blame was solely McFarland’s. Those facts alone are strong evidence that Fyre is partially a cover-up, shot and edited to conceal FuckJerry’s mistakes under garish anecdotes about blowjobs-for-Evian. Furthermore, in an email to Michael Swaigen sent by Mick Purzycki dated March 25, 2018, he wrote: “I have final cut on the film and will not be approving anything that is not done with integrity.”  

Netflix disputed Purzycki’s “final cut” claim, telling me that “Jerry Media did not have final cut. There was an initial agreement that either party could walk away at any point and retain the rights to what they came into the project with. This was superseded by the distribution agreement where the final cut was with the director.” Purzycki confirmed that he sent the email to Swaigen, but that eventually “all production companies ultimately agreed that final cut belonged to the director and the distributor of the film.” (Purzycki also told me that McFarland was originally supposed to appear in the Netflix movie, according to a deal cut with Jerry Media for 12 percent of the film’s backend revenue to pay back ticket-holders, but he failed to show up at the last minute.* Vice confirmed the proposed arrangement, undermining Smith’s accusations of unethical behavior by Hulu.)

But whoever was in the room when that final cut was made, FuckJerry was still heavily involved. Purzycki has pivoted the old, tainted brand to video, dressing it up in the credibility of names like Netflix and Vice. These companies have been used, in effect, as the washing machine through which FuckJerry (and Matte, to some extent) laundered its involvement in a catastrophe.

Fyre Festival was the kind of international news flashpoint that encourages us to draw conclusions about the times we’re living in, but we’ve been failing to connect the dots between the festival and the coverage that has followed it. It’s scary to think about how Fyre Festival would have been portrayed if Hulu hadn’t rushed its movie out. The great thing about twin films is that, through different treatments, the competing accounts end up pointing the viewer toward the truth. Fyre Festival is a story about insidious digital marketing, corporate irresponsibility, and the misdeeds of a handful of men who control the images that appear on your social media and shape your opinions. They are doing it again, just under a different name.

*An earlier version of this article stated that McFarland had reached an agreement with Jerry Media to appear in Fyre in exchange for revenue to pay McFarland’s debts. The agreement stipulated the revenue would pay back ticket-holders who had been scammed.