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Amazon bosses’ missus gives biography a poor review

by on05 November 2013



Don’t slag off my Jeff

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's wife MacKenzie used the online retail giant's own website to slam a new high-profile book about her husband.

In an online review posted on Amazon's page for the new book "The Everything Store," which is about Bezos and the online retailer, MacKenzie Bezos criticizes the account by author Brad Stone as having "way too many inaccuracies" and a "lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon."

There is a writer’s Godwin Law which says that when a reviewer resorts to saying things like “full of typos” or “too many inaccuracies” they have usually found one or two minor ones and are just trying to make themselves more important than the writer.

In this case the “too many inaccuracies” extended to things like the date when Bezos read the novel "Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro. Stone called these changes small tweaks and added that "in an account of this size, some mistakes were inevitable."

Amazon accused Stone of not doing a thorough job of fact-checking the book and said he only let the company review specific quotes. We guess for it to be truly accurate it would have to be censored by company PR bunnies. Stone said in an interview that Bezos did not cooperate with him on fact-checking. He said he stands by his book and spoke to hundreds of people about the events described in the book, and also fact-checked with employees, partners and rivals of Bezos.

Stone, who works at Bloomberg, said he has been covering technology for 20 years. The book, which came out on October 15, has garnered positive reviews. The New York Times called it "an engrossing chronicle."

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