Yes, with conditions.
Bezos himself writes, in the article we're discussing:
I asked him to prioritise protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter. - emphasis mine.
And that:
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
Thus making it plain, simple, and obvious, that he recognises that having a net worth up around the US$137 billion[1] mark has it's perks.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Edit: inconsequential grammar improvement
Fair point, but obviously someone like Bezos should be able to make use of his resources in cases like these and I‘m sure nobody is arguing against that.
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
You’re right, most people are never going to face such an adversary personally.
But there are legions of other adversaries, at all sorts of levels, who are out to pray on almost anyone with a bit of money / fame.
What they care about is whether you have something that poses a danger to their (hidden) agendas.
If this is true, it may also mean that it is more likely that you have a lot of money (because there appears to be a statistical correlation between having lots of money and having stuff that's dangerous to the agendas of state-level global actors, likely because having lots of money means having lots of power and influence, which results in getting access to "stuff" you wouldn't have otherwise), but the former does not automatically result in the latter, and it also isn't a requirement for the latter.
Hence you can very well, through an infinite amount of random circumstances, come into possession of material deemed "dangerous" by the US and Saudi governments, while still being just a normal person living a normal life with a 5-digit net worth. Resulting in you being blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments. Most likely with quite some success.
Essentially we could develop a herd immunity to blackmail.
But if humanity as a whole...
As far as I’ve been able to determine, much to my chagrin, in many of the ways that matter most, humanity isn’t a coherent whole.
And I’ve got no idea what to do about it.
That would make being caught leaking the photos perjury. The stakes are so high that AMI might well not dare to do that.
Its easy to imagine that Bezos, whatever he is saying publicly, is also getting excellent legal consul privately and that two can play at the games that AMI is so infamous for.
The kind of people who care about "celebrity gossip" will have no idea who he is, and the people who do know who he is won't care. There is no market for these photos.
We all hate when the big guys use lawsuits to stifle the little guys, but getting AMI execs tied up in legal worries and costs seems, in this instance, to have popular appeal?
The only thing those photos would change is undeniably confirm that richest man on the planet has actual human male body and some love life, which pretty much everyone already suspected.
Some people will get a kick of it but it will eventually blend into the background same as fappening or a photo of a hole in the sock of president of world bank.
Then imagine if the material was about this other woman before he got his divorce.
Then imagine if the material contained actual borderline illegal stuff or something like photos of his nieces on a beach holiday.
He got lucky - many many others would capitulate.
"Imagine if instead of simply walking down the street you punched everybody you passed."
even if that isn't the case, the amount of effort required for amazon to obtain a warrant from a magistrate judge or however they'd play it is negligible.
All they need to do is to tick one of the boxes in their ToS and kick them off their property. Heck, there's an entire sub-category of law colloquially known as "Amazon-law", where you hire folks who specialize in navigating the intricacies of Amazon's policies so your business doesn't get crushed:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
Edit: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ TL;DR - they can do whatever they want.
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Character assassination of the chief head of AWS is damaging to the reputation of AWS in no uncertain terms.
We're at a point in time where the public, politicians and the tech community itself are becoming wary of tech monopolies. Currently Amazon has avoided the brunt of it (mostly due to being consumer friendly unlike Facebook) and the scrutiny it has had, has been focused on it's retail business.
Bezos booting someone off AWS would bring a ton of public scrutiny to an even more powerful monopoly, one that the public and politicians are by and large ignorant of. Plus it would (rightly) shake the tech community out of its complacency around cloud lock in and encourage us to explore solutions. (I realise there's already a lot of good work happening around this, but it's not an issue I've seen the wider industry talking about much)
Even if AWS has nothing to do with this it (unfairly) reflects extremely bad on them.