Bezos's wedding was a vulgar spectacle

The story of a self-basting billionaires

You couldn’t have missed the news last week that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got married for the second time. The story goes that he ditched his old wife — a woman he met when they were both normal people working normal jobs — for his affair partner.

The new woman is former journalist Lauren Sanchez. I find her deeply unsettling. She looks like a wax mannequin who's escaped from Madame Tussauds.

But whatever. Infidelity is bad, though there’s no point in moralising, especially to billionaires. I’m sure they have as good a chance of a happy marriage as anyone. Well, so long as Sanchez stays away from open flames that is.

Ideally, I would know nothing about the Bezos wedding. I wish that he and his uncanny valley bride had been married somewhere exclusive and quiet. A French vineyard perhaps, or a tropical island. Personally, my vote would have been for them to exchange vows in a submarine, somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean.

But, of course, that’s not what happened.

Their wedding – a tasteless carnival of excess – shut down chunks of Venice and was attended by the biggest publicity beacons in the world. Among the guests were The Kardashians, Oprah, Leonardo Dicaprio, Sydney Sweeney, Ivanka Trump, Tommy Hilfiger, and Usher.

Were these actual friends of Bezos and Sanchez? Surely not. What would a balding tech tycoon in his 60s have in common with 27-year-old movie star Sydney Sweeney? What would they possibly talk about?

These were not loved ones, they were props. Meat puppets dressed in their finest, brought in to dance for the spectacle.

And what a spectacle it was. Foam parties on $500 million dollar yachts. Models. Designer clothes. Paparazzi. Money that could positively change the world was frittered away on a week of vulgar celebration.

Make no mistake, the Bezos wedding was a performance, one that he and his overstretched-rubber-band of a wife wanted the world to watch.

But why?

If I were a billionaire in the current political climate, I’d want to keep a low profile. Inflation, wage stagnation, the vanishing middle class, the lingering possibility of war makes fertile ground for social unrest. If history has taught the rich anything, surely it’s to eat one’s cake quietly, out of the view of the hungry masses.

Bezos has not heeded that lesson.

Since this wedding extravaganza started, Google searches asking “how much is Jeff Bezos worth?” have exploded:

The answer to this question is staggering – he has amassed a wealth of $237 billion dollars. It’s an amount of money that defies my imagination.

So let me frame it in a more manageable way.

If you’re an average person, $10,000 is probably quite a lot of cash. It would either be a scary bill in the mail, or an exciting windfall on a scratchie.

So imagine now that you were paid $10k every hour — you’d have a house deposit in a day, and be a millionaire in a week.

How long, then, would it take you to catch up to Bezos?

Well, if you’d been getting $10k every hour since the birth of Christ until now… you still wouldn’t have as much money as Jeff Bezos. That’s how fucking rich he is.

It’s a revolting amount of money, more than a person could possibly spend in a lifetime. But rather than using his billions to fix the planet, or even improve it in a meaningful way, Bezos is making a gauche spectacle of himself and expecting us to be entertained.

Are we entertained? Or are we angry?

Perhaps people wouldn’t make jokes about eating the rich, if billionaires weren't openly basting themselves in public.