"Since 2019, Amazon.com has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers by manipulating the “auctions” that it uses to set the price of ads on its platform," according to the lawsuit.
Page F2From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Three lawsuits this week accuse BlackRock and Amazon of hiding exactly how much they charge.
As it ran on the front
Three lawsuits, one week, one pattern. A former BlackRock employee is suing for twelve million dollars, and the case, if it proceeds, could unveil the firm's secretive pay structure—meaning the structure is currently not public, by the firm's own design, and a court is what it takes to see it. Separately, the FTC and twenty-two states have sued Amazon over what they describe as a secret ad surcharge scheme. Separately again, a bombshell suit puts a number on it: billions, taken from advertisers, through ad prices the suit says were secretly manipulated.
Run those three side by side and the ledger shows the same line item three times: money moved, and the people paying it were not told the true price. Not a discount left undisclosed, not a fee left undisclosed—the price itself, understated, until litigation forced the filing open. That is the mechanism in all three cases: the number the customer or the employee was shown was not the number that was true, and the gap only closes in a courtroom.…
…(cont) Twenty-two states signed onto the Amazon complaint. That is not a fringe filing; that is a broad quorum of state attorneys general looking at the same ad pricing data and reaching the same total. The BlackRock case is one employee, twelve million dollars, and a firm whose pay structure has stayed private long enough that a lawsuit is the only listed way to see it.
The gap this week is the same size in three different filings: the price advertisers thought they were paying, the pay an employee thought they'd earn, and the number that turns out to be true once somebody with subpoena power opens the books. Whose column that gap benefits doesn't require a motive, hon—it's the same column every time, the one marked revenue, and it isn't the customer's or the employee's. The filing and the announcement rarely match on the first draft. That's what the lawsuits are for.
The receipts
Regulators allege that sellers and brands were overcharged by tens of billions of dollars through secretly inflated ad prices.
A former employee in BlackRock’s Long Term Private Capital fund is accusing the firm of failing to pay a single cent of the carried interest it promised him, according to court documents.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.