Banned article about Jay-Z's great champagne robbery

Tl;dr - Jay-Z featured a previously unknown wine in a music video, suddenly it is selling at a luxury price ($300 a bottle) for a bottle of wine experts say should be $60-$90 a bottle. The writer makes a case that Jay-Z has financial interest in the wine company.

So what's the story? The Atlantic published this online and then deleted it, or what?

Yeah I'm curious too. I see references to it and copies of it everywhere but the original is down.

I'm guessing it could easily fall under libel/slander/defamation.

I don't want to get all Alex Jones on this, but I think shit like this goes down for nearly every new brand that makes it into western culture.

When the sources we use to develop brand preferences are cross-bred to producers of stuff, our brand recognition processes are disrupted, hijacked, and corrupted. In the end, consumers lose.

You should see the tv special "Merchants of Cool" which talks about the tv and music industry, being owned by just five companies, and how they mold and shape the product, tell us what is cool, then sell it to us only to tell us it's not cool anymore.

This doesn't surprise me in the least, if it proves to be true (which it appears to be, I'm just saying it isn't an undeniable case.)