Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman has a startling tidbit buried in his filing today: Jeff Bezos seriously considered buying American Media, parent of the National Enquirer. Why? To find the leaker of his sex photos with Lauren Sanchez. Lauren’s brother Michael tells that to Sherman in the piece.
Sanchez: According to Michael, they discussed various options regarding how to respond to the story. One option even included Bezos buying A.M.I.—not such an outlandish consideration given the seriousness of the breach and the fact that, for Bezos, the price of the tabloid company is essentially a rounding error—to find out the source of the leak. “We discussed the possibility to buy A.M.I.—not to kill the story, but to find out the source. They said that’s not a bad idea. We discussed numbers and the name of the LLC that we’d use. It would be called BOBO LCC”—short for Lauren’s helicopter filming company, Black Ops, and Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin—“that’s the level of detail we went into.”
VF is more excited that Sanchez spoke to Sherman. But I think this is the great scoop. Bezos is worth billions. AMI is in the red, in the hundreds of millions. Bezos could have bought their debt and put them out of business, and found the leaker in their files. I’m glad he didn’t though! We can’t live without the fun of the National Enquirer!
