Jeff Bezos’s first wedding, back in 1993, was at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach. Jeff and his first wife, MacKenzie Tuttle, were gawky and adorable. He was skinny, losing his hair, with glasses, a goofy grin and a honking laugh. She had a scruffy, lopsided pixie cut and slightly wonky teeth. The couple met at work a year or so earlier, when he interviewed her for a job as a research assistant. She was attracted to his laugh and asked him out for lunch. Three months later they were engaged. Three months after that, they were setting up an adult-size play area with huge water balloons for their wedding guests and ending the event with a late-night pool party. Amazon was just a twinkle in his eye – a twinkle that his bride believed in so much she drove from New York to Seattle while he worked on the business plan.
The venue is a triumph of gilded-era America’s fascination with European style. Built in 1895, the resort’s Renaissance Revival architecture includes the Venetian Ballroom; the Gold Room, based on Venice’s Galleria Academia; and the Circle Ballroom with a huge Venetian crystal chandelier.
Towards the end of the month, Bezos is getting married again. This time, he is the third richest man in the world, a muscular, toned, superyacht-owning billionaire who goes to space in a cowboy hat. So why go for oval murals depicting Venetian landscapes when you can have actual Venice? Why have a room based on the Galleria Academia, when you can book the former church Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia in the heart of the city as well as the island of San Giorgio, just opposite St Mark’s Square?
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez will zip along the Grand Canal to the Aman hotel, for the bridal suite that George and Amal Clooney used. Instead of the guys from the hedge fund in New York where he and MacKenzie used to work – his boss Bob Gelfond and the software designer Tom Karzes – they’ll have Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Eva Longoria, Bezos’s good friend Barry Diller, Orlando Bloom and Oprah Winfrey at the wedding, all staying in booked-out hotels – the Gritti, the Danieli, the St Regis (where Ivanka Trump is staying) and the Cipriani, each booked out in its entirety at an average of $500,000 a night.
In 1993 the Palm Beach Post didn’t send a photographer to catch the happy couple. In 2025 Sánchez hired her own photographer for her hen night in Paris, with Nicolas Geradin, who usually works with celebrities such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Shakira and James Franco, following Sánchez, Perry, Kardashian, Jenner and Longoria from the Cheval Blanc hotel to a fried chicken dinner at Lafayette’s. The bride-to-be updated Instagram as they went. Her handbag alone, an Eiffel Tower-shaped purse from designer Judith Leiber, cost $8,000.
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“That bachelorette party was very, very showy with the media giving them as much attention as the Kim and Kanye [West] wedding,” points out Louis Pisano, the Paris-based journalist and cultural commentator. “It was rolled out as a new royal wedding, and that is what they are attempting. It’s very calculated. She’s curated these people with a quota for each type – the TV anchor, the pop star, the actor. Everybody knows that they’re there to play a part. Venice is perfect for that. The only other option would be a chateau, but they want something a lot more high society than just renting a castle.”
‘It was rolled out as the new royal wedding and that is what they are attempting … It was very calculated’
Louis Pisano, journalist and cultural commentator
He points out that Anna Wintour is helping Sanchez style her Oscar de la Renta wedding gown, just one of the 27 Italian designer dresses the former Fox News anchor has bought for the affair, after a summer spent being papped in skintight Cavalli. Vogue is running the wedding pictures, the latest in a relationship that started when Jeff paid $1 million to sponsor the Met Gala in 2012 and $350,000 for a table in 2024. “Anna understands that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez are not just a passing fad - they are the new elite. They will do anything to stay relevant and understand that to be immortalized you need pop culture and the media.”
San Giorgio, where the build for the party is already under way, is perfect for the new elite’s Instagram. Standing in front of its Palladian church, you have Venice as the ideal backdrop for those wedding photos. This wedding, conservatively estimated to start at around $10m with extras and running from June 24-26, is a pageant of excess, with private jets, superyachts and an exclusively reserved fleet of vintage water taxis ferrying a guest list that doubles as a directory of global elites.
Venice, with its sinking grandeur, is the favoured backdrop du jour for excess. This wedding is just the most spectacular example of this triumph of hyperwealth – as moneyed-up transactional friendship groups do the new ’Gram Tour, colonising Europe’s great cities via private yacht or jet. In the past few years, for instance, the wealthy have travelled from across the world to include Venice in their wedding pics – the Indian billionaires Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant stopped off in their chartered cruise ship before their $1bn Mumbai union, while Alexandre Arnault, 33-year-old son of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault, married Géraldine Guyot at the Cipriani in front of Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams. There was at least one millionaire wedding a month in 2024, according to one event organiser.
“Venetians are afraid that weddings are the only way in which we exist in the world,” Professor Gianpaolo Scarante, 74, explains. From an old Venetian family, he was an Italian ambassador before returning to teach and head up the Ateneo Veneziano, the Venetian equivalent of the Royal Society where we meet. “We have become an empty city. People come to get married for the photos and the backdrop. There are so many weddings in Venice these days. We are like actors in our own city’s Disneyland.”
Bezos decided on Venice not because the city invented modern debt in the 12th century and a 2021 ProPublica investigation found that he pays 1% tax by living on money borrowed from banks against his Amazon shares. Nor because, as an EV investor, he was interested in car-free living. No, he stayed at Diane von Fürstenberg’s palazzo on the Grand Canal last year and said: “The city’s perfect, I’ll take it.” She was the first to call for Bezos and Sánchez to do more than use Venice as a backdrop. Von Fürstenberg told the Italian press that she’d said to him: “If you come and get married here, you should give Venice a big present”. Asked if that should be a financial donation, she said: “Yes.”
So far, according to Marco Borghi, president of the municipality of Venice, no money has arrived. The city needs support. Not only is it sinking into the lagoon around it – in the past century it has subsided by around 25cm while the sea level has risen by about 30cm – but the population is leaving.
Currently, the historical city has 48,166 residents. There is an LED display in a pharmacy in Campo San Bartolomeo that updates this number as it falls. Back in 1951 that was 174,808, but as all industries except tourism left the city and moved to Mestre – called terra firma, the mainland or even abroad by old city Venetians – so the population followed. These days, in the Marco Polo bookshop in Campo Santa Margherita you can find an equivalent counter – the number of tourist beds in the city. Last week, that number was 51,553.
Bezos met Sánchez at a party he hosted in his $24.5m Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills for the launch of Amazon’s unexpected Oscar winner Manchester by the Sea. MacKenzie didn’t like Hollywood parties and stayed at home in Seattle. Sánchez was introduced by her husband Patrick Whitesell, CEO of Hollywood agency Endeavor - one of the most powerful men in Tinseltown. It was Whitesell who suggested Bezos hire Sánchez ’s helicopter company, Black Ops Aviation, which the anchor/actress launched in 2016 after earning her pilot’s licence. Bezos called on her in 2018 to shoot footage of his rocket, Blue Origin. That April, they were spotted dining together and the pictures were sold to the National Enquirer, so that when Bezos and MacKenzie announced the end of their 25-year marriage in January 2019, he was racing against a picture splash from the tabloid revealing humiliating text messages between Sánchez and Bezos from April 2018.
It’s around this time that Bezos started to change. After buying the Washington Post in 2013, a defiant Bezos fought alongside the editor Martin Baron against Trump 1.0’s attacks and it was Bezos who suggested the newspaper’s slogan “democracy dies in darkness”.
“We were fortunate to have him as the owner,” says Baron, executive editor from 2013 to 2021. “He did not interfere with the coverage. He didn't suggest stories, he didn't quash stories, he didn't do anything like that. He backed us up publicly, spoke on our behalf very articulately, and Amazon lost huge contracts from the government because of our coverage. We used to joke that it didn't cost Bezos $250 m to buy the Washington Post. It cost him $10,250m dollars.”
Baron left in 2021 and wasn’t there to hear Bezos refuse to back the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 or his subsequent instruction that the paper’s opinion pages would support free-market ideals – as well as his donation to and appearance at the Trump inauguration, suggesting that he’d joined the rush of Silicon Valley billionaires into Trump’s tech bro enclave.
Did Sánchez influence the shift? She’s a former Fox News anchor and has been friendly with Ivanka Trump since they became neighbours in Florida in 2019. “I mean, certainly this question is talked about at dinner tables in every state in this country – the two things were side by side, right?” one former Post staffer said in a late-night phone call. “He bought the Post and he said all these things that everybody agreed with when he was with his old sweetheart. Then Lauren arrives, and she’s quite the polarising figure. She was sitting right in front of me at a funeral at 11am and I have never seen that much boob exposed before noon, ever, let alone at a funeral. ”
By 2023, Bezos was buff and toned, his shirt sleeves tight with bulging biceps. Was he heading full steam to Trumpland? Possibly. Over the course of his career most of his political donations have been to Democrats, with the largest sum being $100 m paid to the Obama Foundation in 2021. Figures for election donations in October 2024 showed just over 73% of contributions from Amazon-affiliated donors had gone to Democrats while Republicans received about 27%. As a company, Blue Origin donated nearly $70,000 to Harris, and nothing to Trump. Is it fair to say he switched his views because he got a new girlfriend?
“It's never one thing, right?” the staffer says. “Just on the Lauren thing: a friend of mine was in his class at Princeton, and she says he wasn’t attractive. He wasn’t the guy who was getting the girls. Now he’s got money and any woman he wants, and he’s liking it. But he’s not erratic, like Elon [Musk]. He doesn't do all these drugs – unless he’s doing something to pump himself up physically. Does Lauren have some influence? Probably. When he was choosing a new editor for the Post the final three candidates were invited to dinner, one after another, with their respective partners. Lauren was there, and she was asking more questions than him. So I keep hearing that if you talk to her, you get a completely different impression than if you look at her Instagram. Maybe some of the dumb party guy stuff on the yacht is just him loving not being a dweeb.”
The Wired editor-at-large Steven Levy, who has interviewed Bezos many times, including once spending three days on his Texas ranch, muses on Bezos’s switch from “abnormally normal” life to the new Trumpian glamour. “Definitely his lifestyle in the past few years is at odds with the workaholic I knew. Back then he loved to geek out with his science-minded buddies for leisure. Maybe he still does.”
One former Amazon communications director suggests that the glamour was something Bezos always longed for. “He buys a house in Hollywood to make films and TV that have no effect on Amazon’s bottom line,” she points out. “He sponsors the Met Gala. When he buys the Post, he buys two – two – mansions in DC where he throws parties. This is what he’s always wanted. And Lauren gives him the excuse. So when he’s on the red carpet it’s less Jeff Bezos seeking attention, and more that he is there with his wife.”
Pisano agrees. “Sánchez is a cipher for a new kind of social ideology where the billionaire wife isn’t a passive trophy - she’s a co-creator of a dynastic narrative. This is a world where power is less about what you build and more about who you bind yourself to, and where the spectacle of wealth eclipses all other contributions.”
Certainly Bezos seems to be enjoying himself. He’s been spending his summer on a slow sail around the Mediterranean in his superyacht Koru, a 127-metre sailing yacht that cost about $500m.
Bezos joined the vessel in April and last week the couple were in Milan for a fitting for their wedding clothes. He’s drifting towards his nuptials even as Musk, his space race rival, falls out of favour in Washington. Levy, a space enthusiast, is a little concerned at Bezos’s summer cruise. “I'm more interested in the idea of the senior rocket player – I want to know when Blue Origin will put humans in orbit or get a vehicle on the moon.”
This question has many in Washington worried. After Musk’s recent, and rapidly rescinded, threat to decommission his Dragon spacecraft after his spat with Trump, at least three commercial space companies - Rocket Lab, Stoke Space and Bezos’s Blue Origin - have been contacted by Nasa and Pentagon officials about the status of their rockets and when they might be available for government missions.
“There has been enormous concern in the top levels of the US government, the head of Nasa and the security that Elon Musk could have paralysed the US government if he shut down his satellites,” explains one former US State Department official. “At least 18 months ago he owned and controlled more satellites than the US government. As he’s got more wealthy, he’s become more worrying. Jeff Bezos is pretty much the only guy who can help. I’m saying this because Bezos did not like Trump. We know that. He wanted Kamala Harris to win. So why is he suddenly licking Trump’s boot? One possible scenario is that he thinks in the long term, and Trump is short-term pain for long-term gains. Jeff Bezos is one of the big winners in this epic Musk-Trump feud.”
If Bezos's absence is being noticed in Washington, his presence is resented in Venice. The hotels he has booked are international chains, not owned by Venetians. Local staff are working for the minimum wage of €7 an hour. Amazon Web Services is central to the city’s Great Eye of Sauron - Venice’s Smart Control Room, which uses CCTV, phone data and 34 sensors to track every mobile phone in the city in real time.
When he’s partying on San Giorgio or having cocktails on his yacht. which will moor at the Riva dei Sette Martiri, he will have an impressive view of the protests planned against the wedding.
Under the banner “No Space For Bezos”, activists from the Laboratorio Occupato Morion, an old church building near the Ponte San Francesco, are planning a series of disruptions. Last week they lowered a banner with the word Bezos crossed out in scarlet and let off flares from the top of the church tower on San Giorgio.
“It’s a protest against a double thing,” says Federica Toninello, 33, in a hall where young activists are preparing anti-Bezos banners. “It’s against what this marriage represents - the commodification of the city. It’s become a brand and the kind of jobs that come from big events are short-term jobs on low pay, so Venice is left worse off. And then the oligarch, the owner of Amazon. He represents the 1% of the population of this world that is really living on our backs. They don’t pay taxes. They just do whatever they want. They are not accountable for anything.”
He represents the 1% of the population that is really living on our backs. They don’t pay taxes, they just do whatever they want
Federica Toninello, protester in Venice
The activists plan to take to the water using tricks they learned from blocking cruise ships in 2021. One involves simply jumping in. The carabinieri on their jet skis can’t fish the activists out as the risks involved are high. In the Bacino, the busiest stretch of water in Venice, this can be inconvenient. In the canals around the Misericordia, police have no option but to shut the entire canal. A source among the activists said the focus for the demonstrations would be 28 June and involve disrupting the Misericordia area where one of the wedding events is happening. “We will swim in the canals, we will put our boats to block the access to that place. Jeff Bezos is not welcome in Venice!”
This is not Bezos’s concern. His mind is on higher things. He’s no longer huddled in Seattle telling TV interviewers that the Honda Accord is a perfectly adequate car. His wedding isn’t being hosted in a faux Venetian hotel in his future in-laws’ home town. Why would it be when he can party on the actual Grand Canal? There may be protests but as Bezos likes to say: “If you only do things you know are going to work, you leave opportunity on the table.”
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Photographs by Cindy Ord/Getty; Paul Souders/Getty; Chris Carroll/Corbis via Getty; Daniele Venturelli/Getty
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This article was amended on 17 June 2025. An earlier version stated incorrectly that Vogue had paid $1m for wedding picture exclusivity. The title's wedding coverage is carried out on an editorial, not commercial, basis.