Well done us. It can’t be long before Jeff Bezos personally extends his thanks, as he did when we – Amazon employees and Amazon customers – paid for his flight to sub-orbital space, but let’s not wait. As soon as Monday, when his fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, is due with five friends on a rocket trip, Amazon givers could be witness, again, to the kind of unfettered excess that is only possible if everyone, at every level, contributes, even if it’s only via permanent surveillance and a surrendered toilet break.
But no one puts it better than Jeff, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, did himself, after he took his inaugural Blue Origin space trip in 2021. “You guys paid for all this.” More recently, we provided funds – that might not exist without the company’s pitiless working conditions – for Sánchez’s pink diamond engagement ring, proudly exhibited, estimated value, $3m. The billionaire delivered it, an enchanted Vogue writer reported, in the sweetest way, on his massive new yacht, “hiding the ring under her pillow after a starlit dinner à deux”. Few passions have been as exhaustively documented as that between these seasoned lovebirds. (Favourite saying: “Love you to space and back.”) And this week, prior to funding the solemnisation of that love – a June wedding in Venice – it will duly be our privilege to watch Lauren’s hen flight slip the surly bonds of Earth.
Everyone on this pointless excursion will, Elle magazine confirms, wear full makeup. “We are going to put the “ass” in astronaut,” says the singer Katy Perry. “Little girls and little boys are going to be more curious about space and what else is out there because we’re bringing attention to it,” says Sánchez. Already the trip is advertising, to all ages, ticket availability on Bezos’s exclusive Blue Origin rocket tours.
How Venetians, however, are to benefit from their bit parts in the forthcoming Sánchez-Bezos exploit, The Blings of the Dove, is less readily understood. Only last year, the city was so overwhelmed by tourism it introduced an entry fee, though one so small it reportedly made little difference. But its mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, who actively welcomed the Bezos wedding, is reassuring residents that a three-day invasion by the Trump ally, his bride, a retinue of celebrity guests, their countless attendants and media being groomed into a frenzy, is nothing the city can’t deal with. And as much as it might look unappealing, the tradition of US plutocrats Venice-washing their loot dates back at least to the time when Henry James’s friends were crowing about palazzos and treasures you could buy for a song. “The common Italians are not at all aware of the artistic value of such a unique specimen of decoration of 17th century as our gran sala,” wrote the US banker’s wife, Ariana Curtis, after snapping up the Palazzo Barbaro in 1885. “We, however, do not intend to be tied to it – regarding it as a good investment.”
The wedding plan is, reportedly, for the celebrations to centre on the Bezos yacht, a craft famous for its rivalrous mast dimensions, enormous support vessel (or garage/helicopter pad), and custom figurehead, one thought to be modelled on Sánchez until she indicated to Vogue, with the utmost delicacy, that its breasts were too small for that to be true. Tourist crowds will judge for themselves but the briefest comparison of the wooden figurehead and Ms Sánchez wearing, for instance, the corset she picked for Trump’s inauguration, confirms, as do her many candid selfies, that the effigy hardly does her justice.
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Assuming Venice is still happy to be a fulfilment centre for one of Trump’s closest supporters and donors, Italy not being exempted from the financial chaos, our concern, as responsible investors, must be more, then, for the couple’s satisfaction. Is it wise to choose this venue or, indeed, any inside Europe where, after repeated industrial disputes and fines for surveillance of its workers, Amazon – and therefore the obscene wealth of our June bridegroom – remains synonymous with workplace practices widely considered unconscionable? It is a while since the International Trade Union Federation named Bezos “the world’s worst boss”, but last year the European parliament banned Amazon’s (14) lobbyists, citing that company’s repeated refusal to engage with its Employment and Social Affairs committee. Should Sánchez be made aware of what also tends not to feature in magazine tributes to her new career in philanthropy, that the European section of the UNI global union considers Amazon, known for “bombarding” workers with anti-union messaging, as “hostile to the European model”? Or does Sánchez know this, yet still insist on hailing Venice, or the parts of it able to accommodate an Amazon flotilla, from the Bezos substitute for a burnish’d throne? Her brother talks of royal-level spectacle.
While there is every chance, with no Amazon warehouses nearby, that many spectators will simply enjoy the evidence of colossal waste and any amount of fillers, with the chance to glimpse a waterborne Kardashian or Trump, there can be no guarantee others will not react to the provocation. You do not have to be familiar, after all, with the human-cage contraption that Amazon once patented (to allow its human assets to mix with actual automatons) to conclude that a couple intent on Venetian profligacy has learned nothing, not even with the help of The White Lotus, since his “you guys paid for all this” triggered international disbelief.
As we can’t be sure that Venice didn’t demand a fortune in return, it’s possible the city has made Bezos’s late-life bid to look classy, financially worth its trouble. But still: the city offers something that is irreplaceable and desired by the second richest – or thereabouts – man in the world. Isn’t the least Venice could do for the numberless exhausted workers whose dignity Amazon has denied, to show Bezos there’s one thing he can’t buy?
