Truth behind the Bezos lavish Venice wedding

News.com.au

10 hours ago

In an arts centre slash club in Venice's least touristy neighbourhood they gather.
A high school teacher. A receptionist from a small hotel. A university researcher. They are here for one reason – to tell one of the richest men in the world where he can shove his superyacht.
In a matter of weeks the grassroots No Space For Bezos campaign, spearheaded by everyday locals, has become a global story and the wedding this weekend of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez has become a tipping point.
The brewing public anger and antipathy towards tech billionaires has truly boiled over and they have become the bad guys of 2025.
It's not just about Bezos but also Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's 0.0001 per cent of the one per cent with their competing rockets that definitely aren't compensating for something.
Not that long ago these men were being hailed as visionaries and hoodie wearing prophets the subject of fawning Time covers but who are now some of the most publicly hated people on earth who don't have their nuclear stockpiles. (Yet.)
The techno-oligarchy? The Bezos wedding has crystallised the global turn against them.
In an increasingly polarised world where we are all segregated in our filter bubbles, there is, shock horror, a very clear trend in sentiment.
74 per cent of Americans disapprove of Zuckerberg and 67 per cent disapprove of Bezos, according to polling commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project this month.
Musk is disliked by 57 per cent of Americans, according to a survey from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research at around the same time.
Around the world, the campaigns against them is only growing.
In Marion in South Australia a proposal for a Tesla battery factory saw about 950 people going to the hassle of lodging submissions to try and block it.
Such was the vehemence, the Guardian reported, official records had to be redacted, with the paperwork including comments like 'Elon Musk and Tesla are a [redacted] on humanity', 'Elon Musk is a full blown [redacted],' and 'Elon Musk is a [redacted] human being and a [redacted]!'.
In London, for much of this year, real-looking ads began appearing at bus stops with slogans like 'ELON MUSK IS A BELLEND. Signed, the UK'.
They are the brainchild of a British group called Everybody Hates Elon that grew out of a 'ranty group chat' into such a force the New Yorker recently profiled them. In April, a private donor provided the group with a Tesla and invited the public to smash it. One hundred people turned up.
In New York, in April, the Washington Post reported on an 'anti-billionaire bash' that drew 50 people dressed up as Bezos, Zuckerberg and Sanchez to cheekily voice their antipathy towards this new class of men.
I'll keep going. Across the US, in states from California to Louisiana, to Nebraska, Utah and Texas more than 100,000 people got off their couches to support Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's recent 'Fight Oligarchy' tour.
Hollywood has picked up the anti-tech billionaire theme and is running with it.
One the buzziest movies of the moment is Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead about four tech bros who gather at a remote Utah mansion while an algorithm one of them created triggers global violence and apocalyptic danger.
Even the new Toy Story is joining in, with the baddie of the fifth movie, set to be big tech in the form of a tablet called Lillypad.
What has changed is that Bezos et al are longer seen as, or at least just, bright thinkers giving us exciting new digital toys, but men defined by naked grasping for more sticky billions and unmitigated, unchecked self-entitlement.
Zuckerberg, a man who reportedly used to shout 'domination' at the end of staff meetings, was recently photographed landing in a helicopter on his superyacht and does interviews wearing a $1.3 million watch.
Musk has 14 children and had a go at dismantling Washington because it took his political liking.
Fundamentally, they treat the world and the people in it like their playthings.
Bezos wanted to stage what sounds like a little, wee coup of Venice so he could celebrate his second marriage.
Musk dumped nearly $440 million into Donald Trump's campaign and, many believe, swung the election in the favour of a man with 34 felony convictions and who was found by a New York court in 2022 of having sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the 90s.
In 2018, Facebook admitted the platform had been used to incite violence in Myanmar. The year before, the country's military unleashed a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson, according to Human Rights Watch.
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and countless other billionaires zip around the planet in carbon emission spewing private jets and have homes, boats, choppers and transport fleets that have to be counted by the dozen.
Basically, they come across as people with absolutely zero regard for what their actions, business and choices might be doing to lesser mortals.
They act like demi-deities.
Now it feels like all of this has boiled over in Venice. It turns out that even hundreds of billions of dollars and your own space force can't guarantee you the wedding of your dreams.
This week, Everyone Hates Elon joined in on the action, banding together with Greenpeace to take over Venice's famed San Marco square with an enormous banner reading 'If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax'.
At the time of writing, the anti-Bezos movement appears to be winning. In a matter of weeks the group of everyday Venetians have forced a man with more money than Midas armed with a tungsten Amex to, at the 11th hour, rip up his plans and move the reception to a far less historic backup venue.
(Think more concrete by the cubic tonne and less Cannaregio-ish.)
This weekend the Bezos-Sanchezes will be forced to toast one another in a building in the city's Arsenale area, full of warehouses, and not the majestic 16th-century Scuola Grande della Misericordia after protesters threatened to block canal access with hundreds of inflatable crocodiles.
'Obscene wealth,' Marta Sottoriva, a 34-year-old Venetian protester told the Guardian, should not 'allow a man to rent a city for three days'.
And 'obscene' is exactly the word. This wedding, by some accounts, will cost $71 million. Sanchez will have 27 outfits, reportedly. More than 90 private jets are currently parked on the runway at the Marco Polo airport. It has been rumoured that the bridegroom has flown in ex-marines to secure the event where 200 guests, including Queen Rania of Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ivanka Trump, will stay in $16,000-a-night hotel rooms. Kardashians?
They've got two.
All of this in a tiny city where 1000 council homes have been abandoned and are crumbling for lack of funds.
You have to wonder how well the Bezos-Sanchezs have thought about their plans.
Reportedly also on the schedule, a pyjama party, a foam party and a Great Gatsby -theme event.
Things don't turn out too swell for Jay Gatsby, shot dead, the famed novel in part, a take down of the rich.
This year F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic turns 100 and in it he writes of a super wealthy couple who are 'careless people'.
'They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made'.
Maybe Jeff should buy himself the book.