Today, Explained - The Crown Prince and the Amazon King

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Did Mohammed Bin Salman hack Jeff Bezos? Recode’s Peter Kafka returns with an update and Kara Swisher explains Saudi Arabia's impunity in the tech world. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And this wasn't just a claim from Bezos and his baesies. This came from the United Nations. We received the report a few months ago. And over the last few weeks, we have consulted our own independent expert who have reviewed the findings and the work of that initial forensic investigation. And they have concluded, following a range of expert exchanges, that the most likely source of the hacking of Mr. Bezos' phone was indeed a WhatsApp message originating from an account owned by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps best known for ordering a hit on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, may have also dropped some spyware in a WhatsApp message to Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post. We covered the news about Bezos getting hacked almost a year ago when we first found out with Peter Kafka from Recode.

But now that there's evidence pointing to Saudi Arabia, we called Peter back in to help us make sense of the story. Let's take it back to this time last year. Sure. Beginning of January of 2019, the National Enquirer starts running salacious stories about Jeff Bezos having an affair. They run some salacious photos. They intimate they have more salacious photos.

In addition to the, in their words, below the belt selfie, otherwise colloquially known as a blank pic, the Enquirer obtained a further nine images. It's a staggering story. And then a few weeks later, Jeff Bezos, as all billionaires do, writes a post on Medium where he says, by the way, the National Enquirer tried to extort me, they tried to extract things from me so they wouldn't run those photos. Obviously I didn't agree.

He writes this, I was made an offer I couldn't refuse, or at least that's what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I'm glad they thought that because it emboldened them to put it all in writing. And also I have some other stuff I want to get off my chest. He feels apparently that there was political motivation for what the Enquirer was doing. And so our sense a year ago was that this story was more than just a little phone hack. And we were right, but we were also kind of wrong.

We still don't really know. It's definitely a weird-ass story. I was focused on the idea that this was a connection between the National Enquirer and perhaps Donald Trump, since those two entities work closely together. But Jeff Bezos, even back then, was saying, by the way, something involving Saudi Arabia might be at play here.

He didn't say Saudi Arabia hacked my phone, but he mentioned Saudi Arabia multiple times. And it just seemed kind of too wild to think about. And a lot of people sort of ended up ignoring that argument. Well, it turns out that when Jeff Bezos wrote that memo, he believed that Saudi Arabia had hacked his phone. In March of last year, a guy named Gavin DeBecker, sort of a private eye to the rich and famous, who's working for Jeff Bezos and was working for him during this time, publishes under his own byline a piece in the Daily Beast. The title of that is Bezos Investigations Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data. Gavin DeBecker writes, our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence

that the Saudis had access to Bezos' phone and gained private information. This should have been a bombshell. And for, I guess, multiple reasons, everyone sort of ignored it. The conventional wisdom reported in The Wall Street Journal, lots of other places, was the reason Jeff Bezos' private stuff got out is that his girlfriend's brother had somehow got his hands on it and he had sold that information to the National Enquirer. And we were all sort of satisfied with that explanation. Because we're fools. We're fools. I mean, there's a smart person version of being foolish, which is believing in Occam's razor. The idea that the simplest explanation is usually the accurate one.

And for me, the idea that a middle-aged dude whose secret racy text to his girlfriend's got out, he wasn't hacked, that his girlfriend told someone or something like that because that makes sense. By the way, we can, in theory, stitch both of these things together, that not only was Jeff Bezos' phone hacked by the Saudis, but the Saudis then routed that information through his girlfriend's doofus brother, who then sold it to the Enquirer. So this particular angle, this possibility that this was a Saudi-involved phone hack, is ignored for a long time until it's not this week. What changed this week? This week, the Guardian broke the news that there had been allegations that the Saudis had hacked Jeff Bezos' phone and not just allegations, but there's a report and the report is somehow connected to the United Nations. What it turns out is that there's a company called FTI, which has done an investigation into Jeff Bezos' phone at Jeff Bezos' request.

And that report has then been passed on to various important bodies. One of them is the UN. The UN was already investigating the Saudis and their prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who we're going to refer to, as most people do now from here on out, as MBS. He's the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. So what we discovered this week He's the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. So what we discovered this week is that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, perhaps best known in these parts for ordering the hit on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi,

also hacked the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos? Allegedly. We've got a report created by someone Jeff Bezos paid, which says they have medium to high confidence in this theory. The UN put out a press release, says UN experts call for investigation

into allegations that Saudi crown prince involved in hacking of Jeff Bezos' phone. So the UN isn't saying, we believe this is 100% true. They're just saying, it sure seems like there's something here. They then publish sort of an abbreviated version of the report. That's the full report now has surfaced in places like vice.com. So all this is now sort of out there. If you go back and look at what Gavin DeBecker wrote in March of last year,

it's pretty much what he was saying back then. There's just now a document, and that seems to give it a lot more weight. So how exactly does this happen? How does MBS get into the phone of Jeff Bezos? He sends him a text message via WhatsApp. Oh. Just that simple. Just like that. Yeah. MBS is doing a tour of the U.S. This is back when everyone in the U.S. thought he was a reformer, that he was the new, young, progressive face of Saudi Arabia and also, by the way, someone who had billions of dollars to spend.

He was going to let women drive and all this. He was going to let women drive and he was open for business. Well, the prince has arrived. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia is in town tonight for some high profile meetings with Silicon Valley CEOs in the next few days. So he meets everyone from Donald Trump to Michael Bloomberg to Tim Cook and eventually Jeff Bezos. Everyone is very excited to meet with him. They're all photographed with him. And at some point, he apparently has dinner with Bezos. And at some point, they exchange WhatsApp information, as I suppose world leaders do. And then supposedly, MBS

sends him a video attachment via WhatsApp and Bezos clicks on it. And we don't know what happens then in terms of the video. What supposedly happens then is Jeff Bezos' phone starts uploading enormous amounts of information. Huh. And here you have to sort of imagine what it's uploading, but the suggestion is it's uploading personal stuff that he didn't want uploaded and that it is going back to MBS's phone. Wow.

Yeah, that's a wow. Well, first of all, what kind of videos does MBS send Jeff Bezos? Are these like cat videos? Are these memes? Courtesy of Vice, there's a screenshot of the video file. It's got a picture of a Saudi Arabia logo and a Sweden logo. I don't know why. And a play button.

And, you know, if you get random stuff sent to you via email, you generally don't click on it. I think when you get a WhatsApp from someone, you're assuming they know you directly. It's probably safer. And maybe Jeff Bezos is just like us. He occasionally clicks on things that he should not click on. Funny you say that because my dad sends me random videos on WhatsApp all the time and I never click on them. Maybe dad wants to hack your phone. I don't trust him. I don't trust him. Okay, so Bezos clicks on this Sweden-Saudi video for whatever reason, and all of a sudden he's downloading some sort of spyware? Yes, that is the implication. The report speculates that it could be something called Pegasus 3 malware,

a product, quote, widely reported to have been purchased and deployed by Saudi officials. That one's made by the NSO group. That's a bunch of Israeli hackers. There's some other software. They're guessing at what it might be. They don't actually know. Here we should caveat that some information security research experts, including the guy who used to run information security for Facebook,

have looked at the reports that are out there and say, this is certainly suspicious, but they have not proven their case here. We have questions about this report. We are not as convinced as everyone else is. So you can take this with one or two grains of salt if you would like. Okay. So while we're not completely sure what the spyware or malware MBS sent Bezos may have been. Things are looking pretty certain that MBS hacked Bezos' phone. That isn't as much in question anymore?

We're going to use allegedly, we'll use some caveats. And again, this is one report assessed with quote, medium to high confidence, but that is the allegation that all of a sudden Jeff Bezos' phone starts just shooting out data. Increasing data egress suddenly by 29,156%. Data spiking continued undetected over some months and it rates as much as, oh my gosh, I can't even do that math,

106 million percent higher than pre-video data. Does Bezos have any idea this is happening while it's happening? Is his phone, you know, heating up while he's trying to go to sleep or something? They don't seem to think that he was alerted to this. He does then get two weird messages from MBS over the next few months, which he does find suspicious, apparently. One is a picture of a woman, which kind of looks like the woman that he was dating, but not really. Again, if you look at it with a weird caption that essentially says something like,

hanging out with a woman is like reading the software license agreement. In the end, you just press click. That's the actual thing that MBS sent to Jeff Bezos. Sounds like a progressive reformer to me. It's weird. Again, it's maybe the kind of thing your uncle would send you. But that seems suspicious. More suspicious to Bezos is that at some point, he is getting a briefing via the phone about attacks against him on social media, which his researchers believe are coming from Saudi Arabia, and then gets a weird message from MBS saying, quote, Jeff, all what you hear or told to it's not true. And it's matter of time till you know

the truth. There is nothing against you or Amazon for me or Saudi Arabia. Oh, wow. So I don't I don't know what's going on in your life. But if you get that message from MBS, that should alarm you. So wait a second. MBS, while potentially hacking the phone of the richest man in the world and potentially one of the most powerful, also sends him a message in broken-ass English saying, Jeff, everything cool, no phone hack, something like that? It does give you pause. Well, maybe not quite the mastermind.

Maybe it's like if while the CIA was trying to kill Fidel Castro, they sent him a note saying, hey, if you get an exploding cigar in your face, just so you know, it was definitely not from Langley. Oh. It doesn't seem super slick. So we have questions. Why would MBS want to hack Jeff Bezos' phone? There are a bunch of reasons you might want to hack the phone of one of the most powerful people in the world.

Whether or not you were doing business with him, and whether or not he owned the Washington Post, and whether or not he employed a columnist that was antagonizing you. But Jeff Bezos happened to be all those things too. He happened to be all of those things. Do we know what else they got other than potentially, as you so loved calling it, Peter? We don't even know if he got the dick pics there, but that's the guess. I'll say dick pic one more time. I did it three times last episode, so we'll keep it at two this time.

Classy. So, how has the Crown Prince reacted to this report? The Saudi government has denied it. Absolutely not. Total nonsense. Where did that come from? I have no idea. This story was out almost a year ago. It was debunked, but then we rejected it completely. People are trying to sensationalize something that is pure fiction. Now, they have also denied initially that anything happened to Khashoggi.

Then they denied that he was involved, and they have subsequently said, well, other people were involved in the murder of Khashoggi, but not the Crown Prince. They have called for an investigation into this, by the way. Oh.

So they're deeply concerned. Does that suggest, at the very least, that MBS and Jeff Bezos won't be doing business together anytime soon? Seems unlikely. Which, I guess the question will be, what other tech companies

will or won't be doing business with Saudi Arabia? And that is a pretty open question right now. We're going to take a quick break. And after that, I'm going to talk to Peter's Recode colleague, Kara Swisher, about Saudi money in tech.

Kara Swisher, you've written about Silicon Valley's relationship with Saudi Arabia. How deep are these ties as far as we know? Well, quite deep. There's a ton of investment. I mean, the Saudis have been investing in Silicon Valley for many, many years, going back a long way. Big investors in Twitter, big investors in Google, big investors in lots and lots of companies. They've struggled with their Uber investment, obviously. The Saudis have a seat on the board. And again, they're very much involved in lots and lots of companies that we use every day and we don't, you know, you think

about as very popular consumer companies. With a company like Twitter, I mean, we're not talking about the most obvious profit model in the world. What is Saudi Arabia's interest in these companies and especially the ones that don't even have a clear profit model? You know, there's been a lot of upside to being in Twitter. A lot of people made a lot of money from being shareholders of Twitter as it's gone up and down. There's been a lot of money made by Saudi investors in all kinds of things because the internet and tech has been a good place to be involved in.

They've been investing in Apple. They've been investing in Microsoft. They have investments just like any rich people. They want to be involved where the highest returns are, and that's been in tech over the past decade, at least, if not longer. And how did this relationship, if at all, change after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi? Well, it didn't. There hasn't been a cutback in the money. People are taking this money. These are very wealthy people with lots of money to put to use. So does that mean Bezos is basically alone in sort of cutting off his ties to MBS and Saudi Arabia?

And if so, that it took the murder of one of his journalists and the hacking of his phone potentially to get to that point? You know, Bezos has to have a relationship with people all around the globe. And MBS would be one of them, as Amazon seeks to expand to places like Saudi Arabia and across the Mideast. And so the problem is, is that now he owns a newspaper that has a very different point of view about the Saudis. And so, you know, I think he saw firsthand the repercussions of having that newspaper. And there's Amazon, and then there's the Washington Post. Even though President Trump tries to conflate the two, those are two different businesses. And the difficulty of owning a newspaper like this and being responsible for journalists like Mr. Khashoggi, he's going to have repercussions from owning that.

I'm just like wondering, is that what it took for someone in tech to take a stand against Saudi investment, Saudi involvement in one of these firms? Was it, you know, straight up murder or, say, the hacking of a phone? Does the rest of Silicon Valley not have a bar? Well, you know, money is money. If you talk to them off the record, they're all like, oh, dirty money. They do say that. You know, and they actually, I was at a dinner party where they were stack ranking dirty money. They're like, well, the best money to get right now is from the people from Singapore,

the rich people from Singapore, because they're not as dirty as, say, the Russians or the Saudis or the Chinese or whatever. But, you know, these are large, massive amounts of capital that are needed to invest in innovation and these companies. And they're not always from the places you may want them to be from. And so off the record, they'll tell you how awful it is. On the record, a lot of these companies take the money. Yeah. And so your impression is a lot of these companies aren't necessarily thinking

about the risks involved. Well, I don't know what the risk is. I mean, it's just it's a moral risk, right? What's the risk to them? I mean, look what happened to Bezos here. And MBS was also meeting with Bloomberg and Trump and his pals with Jared Kushner. I mean, state secrets could be on the line over there. And then you wrote late last year about Saudi spies inside of Twitter. Right. There's that case. It's an ongoing case. I think it continues to be an ongoing case. Saudi Arabia is spending enormous amounts of money on, I think they're called flies, but essentially they're messing with social media in order to push the, whatever the kingdom of Saudi Arabia wants pushed out there or to attack enemies of Saudi Arabia. So they're using social

media very heavily that way. You know, I think this government is very aware, the Saudi government is very aware of the power of social media and also the ability to do surveillance using social media very happily that way. You know, I think this government is very aware, this Saudi government is very aware of the power of social media and also the ability to do surveillance using social media. And, you know, the idea that they are, which they're denying what they're doing, I don't believe a word of it, that they're spying on Jeff. But the fact that they tried to spy on Jeff Bezos,

oh my God, what would the rest of us are finished if that's the case? Right. Does this story come down to the same thing every other tech story comes down to, which is that this is all going to be put on consumers to protect themselves and exercise caution? Yeah. I don't know why Jeff clicked on that video. I wouldn't click on any video I got from him, Mohammed bin Salman. This is what powerful people do.

They talk to each other quietly off the record. Just the idea that they're hacking into Jeff Bezos' accounts just gives you a sense of how much arrogance that they have towards this and the uses that this government is a government that uses social media to get through whatever they need to get through. And, you know, meanwhile, behind the scenes, they're working with the Trump administration and lots of big companies. And the death of Mr. Khashoggi doesn't seem to matter Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they're working with the Trump administration and lots of big companies.

And the death of Mr. Khashoggi doesn't seem to matter to a lot of these corporations. And they just keep going forward as always. They can get to Bezos. They can get to everybody. That's the thing. With enough money and enough influence, you can get to anybody in this world. Kara Swisher, she hosts Recode Decode. Adweek named it the best podcast of the year last year. Her colleague Peter Kafka, who you heard from earlier, hosts a podcast called Recode Media. It's also worth a listen. No thanks to Adweek.

I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained, probably the podcast of the century, but we'll all be dead or deaf before it's official. Have a nice weekend. Thank you.