Beholden to tech czars

This past weekend, rumors were flying around that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was hosting a $600 million wedding to his fiancée Lauren Sanchez in Aspen, Colorado.

- RAFIA ZAKARIA

This past weekend, rumors were flying around that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was hosting a $600 million wedding to his fiancée Lauren Sanchez in Aspen, Colorado. The rumor reached all corners of the world, with news outlets regurgitating stories about this inordinately expensive upcoming wedding. One TikToker even posted a video of private jets parked at the Aspen airport as evidence that the world's wealthy were arriving for the event. The rumor turned out to be wrong.

Eventually, Bezos, who was there to host a holiday party at a famous sushi restaurant, took to X to clarify matters, saying that people should not believe everything they read. While this may be true, believing such a thing is well within the realm of possibility—after all, Bezos has a fortune valued at $251 billion, so a bill of $600m would not have made a huge dent in his wealth.

One of the people to respond to Bezos's tweet was Tesla founder Elon Musk, who said that he hoped Bezos would indeed host an "epic wedding." Musk is one of the few other people in the world who could also host such an event or an even more lavish or expensive one. Musk—who is the world's richest man (Bezos is supposed to be the second richest)—has a fortune that is more than double that of Bezos at $486bn. His holdings include everything from Tesla cars to the Starlink satellite system.