To be one of the richest people in the world is quite an achievement. Being accepted
into the glamour of the New York Met Gala is another. Jeff Bezos showed up with his
fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, at the biggest celebrity event on the East Coast. She even
had to endure snarky comments from the notorious restaurant owner Keith McNally and
offers of help with her fashion choices from the notoriously critical Vogue queen, Anna
Wintour.
None of it mattered as the couple entered the halls of the iconic Metropolitan Museum in
Central Park. She looked stunning in her strapless see-through black lace Monse mega
corset dress, while Bezos enjoyed the attention in a dark zip-up blazer over a white Tshirt. What a transformation! Bezos, who mostly looked like a computer nerd throughout
his career, started with an obscure online bookstore named Amazon. Upon realizing in
1994 that the use of the then-new Internet was growing by 2300% a year, he quit his job
and began working with his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, in the garage of their home in
Bellevue, Washington.
Today, Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company, with a
revenue of $74.8 billion in 2023 and a market cap of $1.96 trillion. Bezos is among the
world’s richest individuals, with a fortune of just over $200 billion. He held the title of the
world’s richest person from 2017 to 2021, even after losing a substantial portion of his
wealth in the most expensive divorce of all time, where MacKenzie received shares and
real estate holdings worth over $60 billion.
Bezos left the day-to-day operations at Amazon HQ behind as he stepped down as
CEO of the company, now remaining as executive chairman with much less involvement
in business decisions. This marked the beginning of his transformation into a lavish
lifestyle amidst the world’s jet set. Alongside him is Sanchez, a former journalist and
helicopter pilot, who also played a role in his explosive divorce. Nevertheless, Bezos 2.0
emerged in the world’s most glamorous hotspots. Last summer, he embarked on a
seemingly never-ending sailing trip aboard his new monstrous yacht, the Y721,
estimated to cost more than $500 million, making it the largest yacht in the world.
Since his engagement, reports of his activities have shifted from the business to the
gossip and style sections. Following his engagement to Sanchez, marked by a diamond
ring estimated to be worth $2.5 million, the couple recently celebrated his 60th birthday,
which officially fell on January 12, with a star-studded guest list including Hollywood Alisters, athletes, and business moguls.
Besides a glamorous lifestyle and his new love, the wedding is said to be scheduled
soon. His other passions include mainly space travel. He founded the private rocket
company Blue Origin and started commercial flights for paying customers to the edge of
space. He took the trip himself in July 2021 just days after Virgin mogul Richard
Branson upstaged him with his own first flight in a spacecraft of his company Virgin
Galactic. Bezos’ Blue Origin is also competing for NASA contracts, which has caused a
bitter feud with another tech billionaire, Elon Musk, whose space company SpaceX has
dominated the private space industry. It is safe to say that there is no love lost between
the two titans.
Bezos has moved his private life and his remaining business ambitions to Florida,
obviously finding the weather and the business climate more appealing. That is, at least
until recently. After he invested $60 million into lab-grown meat production, the governor
of Florida, Ron DeSantis, banned the technology in the Sunshine State. It is expected
that Bezos will overcome this latest challenge as he always has.
