Marina Hyde: Bezos learns the harsh lesson of texting a crown prince fond of crucifixions
Although Saudi Arabia is already the genre
leader in the public crucifixion space, they may well want to expand their
serial output, perhaps bringing the same characters back for floggings every
week, or finding a way to vertically integrate their beheading content.
Though my tears have yet to liquefy at news that Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, was phone-hacked, there’s a certain dramatic irony to the idea of an accidental circular firing squad among the tech gods. In Norse mythology, a lot of the deities end up doing for each other, so there is vague precedent to Apple’s iPhone or whatever being Bezos’s achilles heel. It’s like an Elon Musk rocket containing the Google boss exploding on the launch pad, or Mark Zuckerberg getting brained by an Amazon drone.
Of course, what
elevates the story of how Bezos’s underpanted selfies may have made their way
into the public domain is the identity of the hacker, which the Guardian this week suggested was probably none other than
Saudi bear and human lumberjacker Mohammed bin Salman. From here on in, we will
refer to the crown prince by his desired nickname “MBS”, which he has no idea
sounds like a discount carpet warehouse on the ringroad, or the name slapped on
the off-brand trainers your mum picked up at the supermarket, which she insists
are exactly the same as the Nikes except for a couple of tiny bits that no
one’s going to notice.
In fairness, a lot of
people took quite a long time to notice a couple of tiny bits about MBS. During
his high-profile 2018 visit to the US, the crown prince was feted by the great
and not-good in Hollywood and beyond. Alas, the unfortunate dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist in
one of his embassies a few months later did what no amount of reports of
starved and bombed Yemeni kids could…. read more:
More posts on MBS and the Khashoggi murder.
