You’re missing the obvious. This article grew out of a year-long investigation, in which Bloomberg’s journalists talked to 17 sources. If any of those sources had actually handed Bloomberg the full picture as it’s presented in the article, then it wouldn’t have taken them a year to put the story together. This is a case where the journalists did a lot of detective work, talking to bunches of people who only knew a few bits, and then assembled the full narrative in the course of writing the article. The danger of such reporting is that if the journalists get a wrong idea about what the nature of the story is, then their reporting is complete bullshit because they’ve put the pieces together wrongly. After spending so long working on it, they are invested in the narrative they’ve put together and so they ignore all the signals that maybe that narrative is off base.
Also, please remember that Apple and Amazon know better than to flat out lie about shit. If they lie about something that has affected their stock price (which this Bloomberg article has done), then they open themselves to SEC investigations and lawsuits from shareholders. That is why corporate lies always take the form of non-denial denials or masterworks of weasel wording. For both companies to so completely, categorically, and unambiguously say there’s no truth whatsoever to Bloomberg’s reporting, suggests that they are, in fact, telling the truth.
