Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s love story is a true fairy tale for the modern era. It’s got romance (affairs), kings and queens (evil rich people), and a city cursed (by climate change). Their classic story was capped off this weekend in true storybook fashion, with a cookie-cutter wedding attended by an actual queen (Rania of Jordan), dozens of fawning hangers-on (celebrities galore), and even an elf prince (Orlando Bloom). It’s a story we’ve seen and heard countless times. The only unknown this time is whether there’s any hero or lesson to be learned—and whether anyone will learn it.
The city’s peasants were locked out of the feast and took to the streets, protesting these billionaires’ (and hundred-millionaires’) contributions to global climate collapse and also Venetian climate collapse. In her pre-wedding Vogue profile, Sánchez said the party was actually going to be “extremely intimate”—just 200 people. And sure, I guess as far as fairy tale weddings go, 200 guests is a relatively small number. But included in those 200 were Oprah, the entire Kardashian family (except Rob and Kourtney, lol), Leonardo DiCaprio, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and Tom Brady. Each of these people almost certainly flies private (horse-drawn carriage much??), comes with their own team of stylists and associated hangers-on (ladies in waiting!), and a security detail (knights etc.). So you can see why a city already facing the effects of climate change might resent hosting a wedding with a carbon footprint that big.
Which brings us to the actual wedding itself which, like any time-honored story, didn’t try anything new. In fact, the outline of the affair sounds a lot like Kourtney Kardashian’s 2022 wedding in Italy, where she wore Dolce & Gabbana, and had Andrea Boccelli sing at the ceremony… which famously pissed off her sister, Kim, who had also gotten married in Italy and also had Andrea Boccelli sing. So, of course, their friends Lauren and Jeff got married in Italy, Lauren wore Dolce & Gabbana and, while they didn’t have Andrea Boccelli sing, they did have Matteo Boccelli—Andrea’s son.
It’s all so tired, so uninspired, and so obviously for-the-cameras it almost feels like a form of sickness to write about it. Bezos owns not one but three estates (castles) on a private island off the coast of Florida known as the “billionaire bunker” where he could have hosted an actually private, actually intimate party. But spectacle and controversy are important parts of Jeff and Lauren’s timeless love. More than anything, what the two seem to share is the world-eating attitude that defines most of today’s ultra-rich. It’s not enough to live the fantasy; they have to flaunt it, too. They don’t just own a yacht, they own “the world’s largest sailing yacht” that almost required the city of Rotterdam to dismantle a 98-year-old bridge so that the boat could make it from the shipyard to the ocean. Her wedding ring is worth an estimated $4 million; the engagement ring is worth about the same. (For what it’s worth, based on my back-of-the-envelope math, it would take an Italian Amazon warehouse employee approximately 400 years to earn that kind of cash.)
But this is what a fairy tale looks like in 2025: the world’s richest, worst people descending like a pack of Marie Antoinettes on a drowning city, throwing money at problems they created, and asking everyone to please shut up and let them eat cake.
Bleak as the billionaire class’s love stories may be, every good fairy tale has a lesson, a moral takeaway that justifies the retelling of a story across ages. And I think here, the lesson is buried in the beginning of this particular tale and that our unlikely hero is Mackenzie Scott, Jeff’s first wife.
Scott played a key role in the founding of the Amazon empire and when she and Jeff split, she walked away from the kingdom with billions. Scott has pledged to give away at least half her wealth, writing on her personal Substack, “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.” Sounds like a hero to me (or at least what passes for one in this, the metastatic phase of capitalism).
So maybe the lesson in all of this is that, while being a billionaire should (morally, politically) be impossible, it doesn’t have to be the enormously tacky, self-serving affair that Bezos, Sánchez, and their friends enjoy. Perhaps they could reflect (hahahahaha) on this particular fairy tale and see that it is possible for rich people to have their cake, as long as other people can still eat too.
But we all know fairy tales aren’t actually real, so what’s most likely to happen is some tightening of prenups, some sucking up to their rich and famous peers, and posting about it in the tackiest way possible. The end.
