If you made a list of the dozen or so faces most likely to be emblazoned on a dartboard, it might overlap with the lineup of speakers at the DealBook Summit, held this past Wednesday above a high-end mall, in Columbus Circle. So when a picket line formed outside it was impossible to guess who the picketers were there to protest. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Meta, or Shou Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, both well-known harvesters of data and attention? Or could it have been Mike Pence, the former Vice-President and January 6th assassination target, who was in town to promote a new memoir and hint at a possible Presidential run? Or Benjamin Netanyahu, also hawking a book, who recently dodged corruption charges by being re-re-re-re-reëlected as the Prime Minister of Israel? Or—the Occam’s-razor answer—Sam Bankman-Fried, the freshly disgraced crypto bro who may turn out to be the biggest huckster since Bernie Madoff?
None of the above. “Let’s remind ’em: New York is a union town,” Chris Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, chanted into a bullhorn. They were protesting Andy Jassy, the C.E.O. of Amazon, which has been accused of union-busting.
Jassy sat onstage in a blazer and jeans, five stories above the picket line, looking unruffled. He was being interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of DealBook, a business vertical owned by the Times, in the acoustically pristine concert hall normally used by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Behind them, visible…
