Amazon slammed over silence on engineer in Hamas custody because company afraid to ‘hurt’ him: ‘It’s bulls—t’
One of the Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas is an Amazon engineer who worked on recently unveiled software — but the company has angered friends and colleagues of the worker for reportedly refusing to acknowledge his plight because they “‘don’t want to hurt him.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky beamed when he presented the Gravitron4 chip at the Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, though he failed to mention that an electrical engineer on the project, Sasha Troufanov, was thousands of miles away, in the custody of Hamas terrorists.
“It’s bulls–t,” an Amazon employee told The Post of his employer’s silence on the situation.
Troufanov, 28, worked for AWS’ Annapurna Labs in Tel Aviv. He was kidnapped from his parents’ home in Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 alongside his girlfriend, his mother, and his grandmother.
His father, Vitaly Troufanov, was murdered in the gruesome invasion.
“They say ‘it’s not that we don’t want to [talk about Sasha], it’s that it will hurt him,’” an anonymous Amazon employee told The Post Thursday of the company’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge Troufanov’s terrifying ordeal.
But Troufanov’s mother, Lena Troufanov, and his grandmother Irena Tati – who were both released on Wednesday – say they trust his friends and coworkers to make decisions about what information to release, a spokesperson for the employee told The Post.
Troufanov’s graduate friends were so let down by Amazon’s silence that they hired trucks with screens bearing his face and name to drive around Vegas in the area of the conference.
“The inspiration was to say that Sasha is one of them – we tried to make a connection between the people that are coming to the conference and to the humanitarian crisis about the hostages,” Sasha’s friend Neta Yesood Alon told The Post.
“It’s not something far away, it’s a person who is just like them, who has been kidnapped.”
The trucks drove down many of Sin City’s main drags, video and photos showed.
Alon said it was “disappointing” to know that “such a big company can’t even say out loud that they have a worker that’s a hostage in Gaza.”
She rejected the idea that Amazon would be risking Troufanov’s safety by talking about him publicly.
“We spoke to the former head of the [Israeli security agency] Mossad, Yossi Cohen…he said there was no danger,” Alon insisted.
“It’s not even hard to know he works for Amazon. You look up his name, you get a LinkedIn saying he works there.. it’s not like a secret job,” she added.
“When Amazon said it would be harmful, we did our check, and [Cohen] said it would be safe to talk about.”
Both Alon and the anonymous Amazon employee pointed out that another hostage, Avinatan Or, worked as an engineer at the AI computing giant Nvidia.
“The global CEO [of Nvidia] has been in close contact with his family, they got a big bonus… it’s a clear picture of how to handle it, because Nvidia has been amazing,” the employee told The Post.
In the immediate aftermath of Troufanov’s abduction, the anonymous employee explained, those who knew him from the Tel Aviv office reached out to Amazon’s management for help with the campaign to return him and his family.
“We shouldn’t even have to…ask management to acknowledge that we have an abducted employee,” they told The Post.
Initially, they continued, the company brought in a ransom expert.
“Which is not really the case here – these people will not be brought back with money,” they explained.
The company then took on a different consulting firm, “which also won’t really do anything, but will take their money and not say that they can’t,” the employee lamented.
The Amazon leadership has allegedly been so tight-lipped about Sasha that “a lot of people [in the company] don’t even know” he was taken by Hamas, they added.
“I think the silence is rubbish,” the employee insisted, saying that the company’s “values went out the window” when the Israel-Hamas war started.
“They ‘strive to be the world’s best employer’? Really? You have an employee that was kidnapped…his entire family was kidnapped or murdered!” the employee insisted.
“It’s bulls–t.”
Other employees at the company are also feeling unsupported as the war between Israel and Hamas drags on, the employee added.
“There’s a lot of hate growing in the Slack channels,” they said.
News about Amazon’s supposed silence on Troufanov and his family’s suffering also started making the rounds on social media, where Sequioa’s Shaun Maguire featured it in an emotional X thread.
“Sasha’s father was buried without any family present — it was recorded in case his family ever returns home…AND STILL AMAZON IS SILENT,” Maguire wrote.
Troufanov’s friends are buoyed by some positive updates: His mother and grandmother, Irena Tati were released by Hamas on Wednesday, and his girlfriend, Sapir Cohen, was released on Thursday.
“The other group of friends stayed in Israel and visited Lena and Ilena – they’re alive, so it’s great news,” Alon told The Post.
Meanwhile, Alon and another friend, Shahar Cohen, flew from Israel to Las Vegas on Thursday to participate in a rally for the Gaza hostages outside the Venetian, where Re:Invent is taking place.
“It’s for all of the hostages – Sasha is just the connection between the tech community and the hostages issue,” Alon said of the Thursday afternoon rally, which was planned in collaboration with the Las Vegas chapter of the Israeli American Council.
“It’s been 55 days [since they were taken] – and 55 days too much,” she said.
The event is expected to draw “300 to 400 people,” Alon told The Post.
The family’s loved ones are also concerned about what Troufanov will find when he does come back.
“His father was murdered, his kibbutz was burned out, they have no home to return to,” Alon said.
“For the people who stayed alive, they need to start a new life, with a lot of grief for those who are gone.”
