You might think that the past couple of weeks would have been hard for Jeff Bezos. Amazon was under siege by the twittery POTUS, and the company’s stock repeatedly plunged and rallied under a whipsawing fusillade of tweets.
The Bezos-owned Washington Post — aka, per the Tweeter-in-Chief, “The Fake News Washington Post, Amazon’s chief lobbyist” — was also under rabid, ungrammatical attack. Then there was the swirling outcry, advanced by competitors, over the possibility of AWS getting the mammoth single-source ‘Jedi’ government contract that would put it even further in the lead in the lucrative cloud space.
You might think that all these things and more, if you were Jeff Bezos, would have you huddled in a boardroom with your lieutenants, crafting new plans, reconfiguring, strategizing, worrying, twisting in the wind.
You would be wrong. While the markets surged and fell, while the Cambridge Analytica scandal began to rage, while Mark Zuckerberg slouched toward his booster chair in the hot seat on Capitol Hill, Jeff Bezos kept his cool.
Literally.
According to local sources, he was in Norway. Alta, the city of Northern Lights, is where his Gulfstream 650ER was snapped at the picturesque, snowy local airport.
http://norwaytoday.info/news/worlds-richest-man-visiting-alta/
It’s the second northernmost city in the world, known for its rock carvings.
None of the close-lipped Norwegian officials interviewed wanted to talk for the record, beyond saying that Bezos stayed at the northernmost ice hotel in the world, the so-called Igloo Hotel — Sorrisniva — which is rebuilt every year from fresh ice.
Sorrisniva offers amenities found few other places: an ice bar where drinks are served in ice glasses, as well as such splendid subarctic activities as dog and reindeer sledding, snowmobile safaris, ice fishing.
Skiing of course, and spectacular displays of the Northern Lights. And also, for the anthropologically minded, an introduction to Sami culture and the Sami way of life.
The rooms at the ice hotel, where the temperature never goes above freezing, are furnished with ‘cozy’ reindeer hides and extreme sleeping bags. You can only book through April, because that’s when the ice starts to melt. So even if he had wanted to, Bezos couldn’t really put the trip off, Trump tantrum or no Trump tantrum.
https://www.facebook.com/Sorrisniva/videos/1744180468974047/
Bezos’ business motivations were not disclosed. Because unlike some people, he isn’t surrounded by leaks.
Sorry, Don. If you thought your tirade would get a rise out of Mr. Bezos, I guess you misread the cards. From one billionaire to another, maybe you could take some tips on chilling out.