At the Bezos-Sánchez Wedding, All Eyes May Be on the Bride, But So Is the Criticism.

The lead-up to the wedding of the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to the millionaire journalist and entrepreneur, Lauren Sánchez (which is slated to cost a cool $45 to $55 million) has been—how do I put this?—fraught.

Protesters in Venice launched a float down the Grand Canal earlier this week, complete with a mannequin of Jeff Bezos himself holding fistfuls of papier-mâché  dollars. Meanwhile, Greenpeace unfurled a huge banner adorned with Bezos’s face that read, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”

Denouncing billionaire excess can only be a good thing, especially when there is tax dodging at stake, but what his fiancée, Sánchez is being hit with is something distinctly more personal. And needless to say, it is a gender thing.

A Look at Lauren Sánchez

Sánchez is “almost mystically magnetic,” The Cut informed its readers a few days ago; her marriage to Bezos seems like “the pinnacle of a long career of social climbing,” quoting the Hollywood reporter and podcaster Matt Belloni. The New York Post’s Page Six reported that Sánchez was having a “beauty blunder” before the wedding. (Her nail artist hadn’t shown up. Yes, really.) 

Elsewhere, coverage has focused on Sánchez’s family and friends—her son; the presence of her ex on the guest list—along with the 27 dresses she reportedly intends to wear through the days-long celebration. And The Daily Mail has spent the past year publishing regular Lauren Sánchez-focused commentary that includes deploying a “body language expert” to suggest she is “desperate to keep up” with the Trumps, and quoting mysterious, unnamed sources saying she “pouts” and is “ignored” at star-studded events, as if she doesn’t already have a reported net worth of $30 million and a long career in media behind her. 

When the happy couple held a foam party on a yacht on Tuesday evening (again: yes, really), the Irish Star in a photo caption referred to them—both of whom were pictured—as “Jeff Bezos and bikini-clad Lauren Sánchez.” (Bezos was also wearing a swimsuit, but it wasn’t mentioned in the caption.)

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos...

Coverage that focuses on Bezos is markedly different. Even after his deeply cringe-inducing sexts and selfies to Sánchez were leaked to the National Enquirer, little commentary has been offered about his family, his nail care, his outfits, his body language, or what he has to gain from marrying a prominent media personality. Articles about who he is as a person—rather than what he symbolizes in terms of wealth and business—are rare, and include phrases like “a man with a pronounced achiever mindset and a very mechanistic worldview,” or, “right on target when he flippantly dismisses an idea or prioritizes a customer complaint over being civil to his underlings.” Oh, to be a man: Where being a jerk isn’t a flaw, it’s a leadership style.

It’s not like Bezos wasn’t strategic himself. His own rise to prominence—from Princeton graduate to hedge fund analyst to Amazon founder—is often lauded as visionary, disruptive, even heroic. The early books about him read like entrepreneurial scripture. So dizzying and effusive was the general admiration of Bezos’s acumen and supposed business genius in those early days of Amazon’s success that early employee Mike Daisey even admitted, in a one-man play about his time at the company: "I feel embarrassed to say it, but the letters I wrote to him—letters I was too chicken to send—read like love letters from a 13-year-old girl.”

In comparison, Sánchez, who started as a broadcast journalist, became a successful helicopter pilot and the founder of an aerial production company, and later re-emerged as a philanthropic partner to the world’s third-richest man, is framed as a climber, not a builder. Sure, she didn’t found a 2.3 trillion-dollar company, but the commentators would have you believe there’s nothing special about her other than charisma. Merely acquiring a piloting license is treated flippantly, while selling books online is treated like a hallowed skill.

Language Matters

The language matters. “Social climber” has no real male equivalent; it often functions as shorthand for calculated, transactional femininity. When a man has friends in high places, he’s a champion networker; when a woman has the same, she’s a hanger-on or a manipulator. 

That’s not to say that Sánchez should be immune to critique. It’s fair to question the symbolism of, for instance, ultra-luxury space tourism as pioneered by that infamous Blue Origin flight. It’s fair to examine the performative pledges of multi-millionaires promising to make the world a better place while buying megayachts the size of a McMansion. But if we’re serious about interrogating inequality and image-making, we can’t stop at the easy, gendered tropes. 

The truth is that Sánchez is polarizing precisely because she doesn’t apologize for her ambition. She leans in, but not just in the Sheryl Sandberg way. She poses, fundraises, flies her own chopper, and makes no effort to hide her proximity to power. 

Men's calculations are seen as deliberate and clever, while women are assumed to have stumbled on a good thing by virtue of looks and lies. 

You don’t have to like her—or the wedding—to acknowledge the double standard. Men who partner with powerful women are lauded for “knowing a good thing when they see it.” Even when they gain access to networks and wealth they could never have built on their own, they’re rarely accused of manipulation. Their calculation is seen as deliberate and clever, while women are assumed to have stumbled on a good thing by virtue of looks and lies. 

The irony here is that Sánchez’s visibility has turned her into a proxy for a broader cultural discomfort with women who rise. She didn’t inherit money. She didn’t marry rich at 22. She hustled, leveraged relationships, changed industries, and eventually got a seat at a table where even rich women are usually just an accessory. If Jeff Bezos can build Amazon from a garage and be declared a visionary, then surely Sánchez can build a career, an image, and a future after a modest upbringing in Albuquerque and be something more than an interloper who tossed her hair and talked her way into the VIP section. 

This wedding may, indeed, be tacky—again, seriously, foam parties?—but Bezos and Sánchez built this glittering monstrosity together. None of us wins when only one half of the couple carries the full weight of that gaudiness on their shoulders.