Did John Legend pull music from Amazon over Bezos’ ties to Trump?

In December 2025, social media posts on sites like Facebook claimed that the singer John Legend announced he would pull his music from Amazon due to its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ ties with U.S. President Donald Trump. Snopes readers emailed us and searched the site looking for more information about the story, which began as follows:

“Wake up, Jeff.” — John Legend suddenly announced that he would pull all of his music, documentary, and brand-related collaborations from Amazon, criticizing Jeff Bezos’ quiet alignment with Trump. The statement quickly became an ultimatum that stunned both Bezos and the public.

Snopes found no evidence to support the claim and plenty of evidence contradicting it. We therefore rate the claim as false.

First, searching Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo uncovered that no news outlets had reported on Legend’s supposed announcement, and Legend’s social media similarly contained no such announcement. Given the prominent status of Legend, Bezos and Trump, news outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true.

However, those searches did display an earlier Facebook post with a nearly identical article. The only difference in that earlier article was the name of the musical star who supposedly pulled a catalogue from Amazon — Keith Richards, best known as a member of The Rolling Stones, not John Legend. 

Some of the Facebook posts spreading the rumor featured links in top comments leading to articles hosted by WordPress blogs, such as one story hosted on the todayonus.com website. It is likely that the rumor was shared with the goal making money off of the post and its accompanying WordPress websites. 

An examination of the article revealed multiple indications of artificial intelligence-generated (AI) text. For example, two separate AI writing detection tools, GPTZero and Originality.ai, provided a 100% probability that the text was generated by AI. In addition, the article contained a hallucination, a common feature of AI-generated text where the AI model creates fictional sources for its information. In this case, the article cited a supposed Truth Social post from Trump that did not exist.

Finally, as of publication, Legend’s music (and merchandise) were available on Amazon. 

Snopes frequently reports on false, AI-generated rumors about celebrities and politicians, running the gamut from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announcing she was pregnant to a fictitious debate between U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Barron Trump.