Jeff Bezos’s heady run of glowing headlines was short lived. The Amazon founder and more recent owner of The Washington Post has for years faced searching coverage of his ecommerce company’s labour practices, tax habits and impact on small retailers even as its share price rose and rose.

With his decision earlier this month to take on a Donald Trump-allied tabloid that exposed his extramarital affair, that changed: even the Post’s Watergate-weathered Bob Woodward wrote of how proud he was that his proprietor had exposed what he claimed was an attempted shakedown by the National Enquirer. Suddenly, the billionaire who has put 100m Alexa listening devices in our living rooms was being hailed as a champion of individuals’ privacy.

Amazon’s decision on Thursday to cancel a plan to invest $2.5bn and create 25,000 jobs in the Long Island City neighbourhood of the New York City borough of Queens paints a more petulant portrait of Mr Bezos.