The summer wedding season kicked off with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his journalist-cum-business founder bride Lauren Sánchez’s €40 million (£34.4m) Venice nuptials, which commandeered the last weekend of June. The three-day affair saw the world heritage site under siege from more than 200 celebrities arriving in 90 private jets and was objected to by climate change protestors, who covered the city in ‘No space for Bezos’ banners and threatened to fill the canals with inflatable crocodiles.
When you’re the third richest man in the world, however, a few protests are hardly going to get in the way of a party. Bezos and Sánchez’s wedding was a spectacle to behold, but it was also the start of their bid to establish themselves as a billionaire power couple.
Despite a hazy origin story – Sánchez, 55, reportedly started dating Bezos, 61, in 2019 after her company, Black Ops Aviation, was hired to film his Blue Origin rocket launches while she was married to Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell and Bezos was married to Amazon co-founder MacKenzie Scott – the couple has slowly found their footing.
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos kiss in Venice on day three of their wedding celebrations. (Photo: Getty)
Once their respective divorces were announced, they embarked on a whirlwind romance that saw them yachting and jet-setting around the world and regularly pictured with A-list friends like Katy Perry and Usher, before getting engaged in 2023. Sánchez’s relationship with Bezos has taken her to new heights – and we’re not just talking about her 11-minute joy ride to space in April.
It made sense, then, for Sánchez to make her debut on the (digital) cover of Vogue the same weekend; another sign of how she plans to develop her personal brand. It was Sánchez’s second appearance in the magazine after her joint interview and cowboy-coded photo shoot with Bezos was mercilessly lambasted online in December 2023. This time, she swapped a white tank top for her Sophia Loren-inspired Dolce & Gabbana wedding gown, which took 900 hours of atelier work. Stefano Gabbana claims the brief was ‘very classic’ and ‘elegant’ as Sanchez ‘didn’t want to do something very flashing or bling bling’.
While Bezos and Sánchez have always had friends in high places, it’s fair to say their brand as a couple has rarely been touted as ‘demure’. Their pre-wedding foam party on Bezos’s $500 million (£364m) Koru yacht did little to help the cause. However, from her Vogue cover to a wedding guest list that included Ivanka Trump, Oprah, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Kardashians, this is seemingly something Sánchez wants to shift – positioning herself as the First Lady of Big Tech in the process.
Her bridal look was indicative of such. Opting for a high-neckline and minimal make-up, she declared, ‘This is part of the evolution. I want it as natural as you can get. […] It is a departure from what people expect, from what I expect – but it’s very much me.’
The marriage will see Sánchez take on more responsibility at Amazon Towers, particularly in the realm of philanthropy, where she is already vice chairperson of the Bezos Earth Fund. The fund is dedicated to ‘fighting climate change and the protection of nature, as well as early childhood education, programming, and housing support’, according to its website. The couple also pledged to donate €3m (£2.5m) to three Venetian institutions, including UNESCO’s local office, on behalf of their wedding guests.
Not before they honeymoon all summer on Bezos’s yacht, though, which is estimated to produce more than 7,000 tons of greenhouse gases every year. The newlyweds reportedly soothed their post-wedding blues by sailing across Italy to the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Sicily, which hosted the second season of The White Lotus. The Royal Suite, where Jennifer Coolidge’s character stayed in the hit TV show, costs a cool $18,000 (£13k) per night – a drop in the ocean for a couple now collectively worth more than $237 billion (£173bn).
They will then be returning home to Indian Creek Island in Florida, known as the ‘billionaire bunker’, where they own three properties worth a total of $173 million (£126m). Bezos’s most recent 10-acre purchase is currently under construction to accommodate their blended family. Sánchez has three children – one with former NFL star Tony Gonzalez, age 24, and two with Whitesell, aged 19 and 17 – while Bezos shares four children with Scott. In the affluent enclave, the family rub shoulders with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, billionaire Norman Braman and model Adriana Lima.
Oh, to be the richest couple in the world, where brazen contradictions of character are immaterial and the sky’s the limit – literally.
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across entertainment, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things pop culture for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow with equal respect).
