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.

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