How To Lose An Internet Fight
eBay executives tried to silence a newsletter. It cost them tens of millions of dollars, seven criminal convictions, and one of the worst public-relations disasters in Silicon Valley history.
“If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.” – Aspen Daily News
Call it the day eBay went psycho.
In 2019, top executives tormented a Massachusetts couple with a vengeance campaign so bizarre they seemed to have raided the prop room of a low-budget horror flick.
The record shows they put Ina and David Steiner under corporate surveillance and plotted to break into their garage to put a GPS tag on their vehicle. Then they systematically harassed the pair with unwanted deliveries that included a bloody pig mask, live cockroaches, fly larvae and spiders, porno magazines and even a funeral wreath and a book about grieving a spouse.
The Steiners, publishers of a newsletter called EcommerceBytes, feared someone was trying to kill them.
What had they done to inspire such venom?
They simply reported the facts about eBay’s customer complaints, its lavish spending amid a declining stock price, and its many other mounting problems as the auction site came under attack by an activist shareholder.
Last week, the couple won a $55.7 million settlement from eBay and its unruly gang of corporate thugs.
What’s most notable is that the former CEO Devin Wenig is personally paying $2 million of the settlement, even though he has never been charged.
Today, Wenig remains a director of General Motors. Ironically enough, he’s also CEO of Symbolic.ai, an artificial intelligence company for journalists, professional writers and publishers that he co-founded in 2023.
He maintains to this day that he didn’t know anything about eBay’s vengeance quest, even as the record clearly shows he texted the order, “Take her down.”
Additionally, Wendy Jones, former senior vice president of global operations is coughing up $500,000. And Steve Wymer, former chief communications officer, is putting up $50,000. Neither has ever been charged for their alleged roles.
“I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes,” Wymer wrote.
These were senior executives lording over a toxic corporate culture that obsessed over critics and encouraged employees to silence them by any means imaginable.
But that’s not all. The latest civil settlement comes on top of a $3 million criminal penalty that eBay paid in 2024 as part of a deferred prosecution agreement.
So much for its mission statement: “eBay was founded in 1995 on the simple premise that people are basically good.” (Never believe a corporate mission statement.)
The online auction company was criminally charged with two counts of stalking through interstate travel, two counts of stalking through electronic communications services, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice.
Seven eBay employees and contractors were convicted of felonies for conspiracy cyberstalking and witness tampering. Shockingly – or perhaps not so shockingly these days – two were former police captains who should have stopped this folly.
Here’s the roster:
James Baugh, eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, received 57 months in prison, two years supervised release and a $40,000 fine in September 2022
David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, was sentenced to 24 months in prison, two years supervised release and a $20,000 fine in September 2022.
Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and two years of probation in October 2022.
Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center, was sentenced to two years of probation, with one year to be served in home confinement in October 2022.
Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations and a former police captain in Santa Clara, Calif., was sentenced to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release with the first year spent in home detention in July 2021.
Veronica Zea, a contract intelligence analyst, two years’ probation with her first year to be served in home confinement and a $5,000 fine in November 2022.
Brian Gilbert, Senior Manager of Special Operations, and a former police captain in Benicia, Calif., was sentenced to time served, one year supervised release and a $20,000 fine in July 2024.
The scandal also cost eBay years of front-page embarrassment and permanent enshrinement in a true-crime documentary, “Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal” released in 2024.
At the same time, eBay’s relatively obscure small-town critics became internationally famous and tens of millions of dollars richer.
No Fortune 500 company has ever lost an Internet shitfight any harder than this.
How’d they get so thin-skinned, so brazen and so childish over two critics with a newsletter?
To understand this unprecedented corporate blunder, you have to look at what was happening inside eBay at the time.
