What do you do when you’ve already bought the 127-meter superyacht, sent your fiancée on a joyride to space and claimed the title of fourth richest person in the world? You throw a $50 million wedding on a sinking city.
Over the weekend, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tied the knot with former TV journalist Lauren Sánchez, his partner of six years. The three-day-long wedding festivities — which, at one point, included a foam party aboard Bezos’ superyacht — took place in Venice across multiple venues and saw approximately 200 guests, including the likes of Bill Gates, Oprah, Tom Brady and a couple of Kardashians.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a destination wedding without some, er, hiccups. Protests erupted in Venice as fed-up locals echoed the growing anti-tourism sentiment sweeping Europe. Still, the backlash didn’t seem to shake the couple’s big day. Fleets of paparazzi on water taxis caught Bezos all smiles, whether boarding a Riva or arriving at the Aman Venice. And while there’s nothing especially remarkable about a man beaming on his wedding day, the photos say a lot: Bezos has come a long way.
It wasn’t long ago that the retail disruptor was Silicon Valley’s dad-in-chief: nerdy, a little awkward, always in a tucked polo and bootcut jeans. He was an online bookseller still married to his first wife, Mackenzie Scott, the novelist with whom he shares four children. But somewhere along the way, the richest nerd in the room decided he wanted to go bigger and bolder. Enter the high-octane, hyper-glossy Bezos 2.0 era: a rebrand so over-the-top, it’s quite literally astronomical.
The multibillionaire shaved his head, got jacked and swapped spreadsheets for skin-tight tees and wide-brimmed cowboy hats. He embarked on a handful of luxurious hobbies like sailing and, well, outer space. He’s mingling with a new crowd of tabloid favorites, from Trumps to Kardashians. There are Vanity Fair parties, Vogue covers (flexing those biceps, no less) and a custom wooden mermaid figurehead carved in the likeness of his new wife.
It’s easy to trace the start of Bezos’s glow-up to that very relationship with Sánchez. What began as an extramarital affair with the former TV journalist and licensed pilot quickly turned into a high-profile public spectacle, as well as the second most expensive divorce in history. The couple jumped into the spotlight headfirst and haven’t stepped out since. They built a fantasy around fitness, love and fame powered by his capital and her on-camera charisma. Can a man be changed? Apparently so, if by the well-manicured hand of the right high-energy woman and a few encouraging injections. Together, they became both poreless and unstoppable.
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There was a time when Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were interested in innovation and high-minded ideals, but that pretense has been shed in favor of a new goal: powerAnd yet, multibillionaires are just like us. If the muscle, expensive hobbies and new, glamorous partner weren’t enough indication, Bezos is going through a midlife crisis. Which is totally normal! We all reserve the right to explore new modes of excitement. But what sets him apart is scale: renting an entire city, building private rocketships, buying the biggest private boat the Mediterranean will ever see.
And he’s not entirely alone in this search for over-the-top personal transformation. Tech billionaires have been quietly rebranding themselves before our eyes. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose gold chain and baggy tee drip, jiu-jitsu phase and “wife guy” era have all gone viral on the very Meta platforms he created. Then there’s the embarrassingly chaotic Elon Musk, who reshaped his persona in real time through outdated memes and unchecked political involvement. For these men, engineering the future had already been accomplished. In a hierarchy of needs unique to them and them alone, reinvention of the self became the only inevitable next step. After all, when you have the money to rewrite the rules, what’s stopping you from going full-on Bond villain?
But even villains get older. Aging with absurd wealth brings its own weird optics. Along with their shared love of being literally anywhere but on land, Bezos and Sánchez also share a well-documented, often ridiculed fixation on youth. Both have clearly spent time and money fine-tuning their faces and bodies. While I’m not one to bash cosmetic procedures, it’s a bit of a shame that all the money in the world couldn’t afford a bit of restraint. Plenty of rich, tastefully touched-up DILFs and MILFs walk among us. Even a Turkish hair implant isn’t a big deal these days.
The inhumanly smooth and shiny result of Bezos’ midlife rebrand isn’t ageless so much as surgically suspended. That’s because Bezos isn’t chasing timelessness — he’s buying time. On yachts, in space, in love. Which makes the setting of the Bezos-Sánchez vows feel all the more poetic. Venice is devastatingly rich, glamorous and clinging to its beauty. It’s a city that, despite aggressive preservation, may very well still sink.
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