I have no idea what the actual story was, but I would imagine it can be both true and not true in the way you’re imagining.
Say you really need new simple scalable storage because X part of your stack has bottlenecks. You spin up a team to work on it, and that team immediately has ambitions of making it big and sharing their service with the entire world. Now... which narrative is true? Yes, it was spun up to help Amazon. Yes, it was built from scratch as a product. Those don’t sound exclusive to me.
Say you really need new simple scalable storage because X part of your stack has bottlenecks. You spin up a team to work on it, and that team immediately has ambitions of making it big and sharing their service with the entire world. Now... which narrative is true? Yes, it was spun up to help Amazon. Yes, it was built from scratch as a product. Those don’t sound exclusive to me.