That a guy who is building the surveillance system for governments worldwide and who has serfdom-lite attitudes towards labor laws, is suddenly a sympathetic character on HN, is kind of surprising to me.
Bezos' pretense that he's standing up for the powerless doesn't ring true to me ("If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?") when contrasted against his attitudes towards his employees' working conditions.
This story to me is Bezos did something, that while increasingly common in modern America, remains viewed as a foolish thing to do. Nothings going to change that, not a criminal extortion attempt by AEI, not even a heartfelt medium post. I see no dominant strategy Bezos can choose that avoids the Pyrrhic conclusion of his private photo being shared widely across the Internet on services he helped create.
It could be that they are both right in this situation.
Just because he is, by all indications, a terrible person (well, pretty regular for a founder) doesn't mean that one should blackmail him like that.
Bezos rightly understood that AMI had no leverage and were on shaky ground.
Again impossible to formulate a compelling picture without more context.