What Was That Guest List, Jeff?

Venice has always been a stage. Even before the tourists, before the cruise ships and carbon alarms, it was a floating theatre of masks and power – mercantile wealth portraying itself as elegance. And last week, it staged something new: a wedding, or maybe the equivalent of a coronation of sorts.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, third richest man in the world, married Lauren Sánchez. We get it. He’s rich. Really rich. He’s rich enough to buy Venice twice over, sink it, rebuild it, and it’ll be a scratch on his net worth. So, when the man throws a wedding, you expect gold napkins and sea-plane valets. You expect secrecy and over-the-top decorations. But what no one could expect, or predict, was that guest list.

Tom Brady. Sydney Sweeney. Sam Altman. Queen Rania of Jordan. Khloé Kardashian. Bill Gates. Leonardo DiCaprio. Mick Jagger. Oprah. Usher. Ellie Goulding sang. There was a foam party, and a pajama party.

It would be easy to call it absurd. But absurd implies chaos. This wasn’t chaos.

Somewhere between surreal and satirical, the Venice affair felt like the world’s most expensive Mad Libs. And here’s the strangest part: no one could figure out why half of them were even there. Sydney Sweeney? Sam Altman? Did Tom Brady take a wrong turn on his yacht and get absorbed into the ceremony accidentally? Leonardo Di Caprio, weren’t you a climate activist?

A Party Without Logic

Let’s start with this: a football star, a tech CEO, a queen, an aging rockstar, and an actress from Eurphoria walk into a room. What do you get? A tax bracket with a DJ.

However, there are two ways to read this.

One is that this was a kind of Gatsby-for-the-AI-era experiment in social power. Bezos doesn’t need friends in the traditional sense. He has yachts. He has blue origin. He has access. What he needed was a tableau. A curated landscape of people who all represent capital in different forms: cultural, political, financial, algorithmic. Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates aren’t friends. But put them on the same water taxi, and suddenly your wedding has presence. Put them next to Oprah and Mick Jagger? You’ve created a myth.

The second interpretation is far more human, and far more tragic: Jeff Bezos doesn’t have friends.

Because if this is who he invited to his wedding, you have to ask—who didn’t make the cut? Where are the childhood friends? The nerdy college roommate from Princeton? Where is the guy from the garage in Bellevue who helped him ship Amazon’s first ever book? Where are the people who’d dance with you before you were worth $244 billion?

Is this loneliness disguised in glitter and wealth? The guest list wasn’t a celebration of intimacy—it was a power diagram. And while Bezos did donate €1 million to Venice’s environmental research groups (a commendable gesture, albeit one roughly equivalent to you and me leaving a ₹100 tip), even that felt more transactional than personal. The planet is burning, Venice is flooding, and Jeff threw a foam party.

Venice Didn’t Blink, It Complained

The organisers, a London-based elite events firm, insisted they wanted to minimise disruption to the city. But Venice, already haunted by overtourism and ecological collapse, groaned under the weight of this new absurdity. The headlines didn’t help: Gulfstreams Arrive En Masse, Kardashians Take the Grand Canal, Sam Altman Seen at Palazzo.

Extinction Rebellion showed up, holding signs with messages like “The planet is burning but here’s Lauren’s 27 dresses.” And maybe that’s the sharpest, most accurate summary of the whole thing. There’s something grotesquely beautiful in it all: the performative decadence, the paparazzi boats, the jet fumes over the canals. A city drowning, hosting a wedding that doesn’t even pretend to be subtle.

Bezos, now married to Sánchez, has completed his billionaire-to-boatman pipeline. He came, he saw, he conquered Venice’s airspace with G650s and then told Ellie Goulding to sing something upbeat. And then, in between foam and foie gras, he had a moment.

Venice has hosted emperors and popes. It has hosted art and war. But it may never have hosted quite so many billionaires playing dress-up in one weekend.